In 1957 Vera Pettigrew, her husband Stanley and baby daughter came to live in the old Georgian rectory half a mile from the tiny village of Annamoe in County Wicklow.
At first sight the place was not prepossessing, but over the following five and a bit years they grew to love the place and its parishioners. Where the River Flows is her account of their daily lives, of the joys and sorrows they experienced in such a remote area. The small mishaps that might have been merely inconvenient in a city took on the awesome proportions of large calamities: cleaning a huge chimney, a temperamental cooker, a walk menaced by a herd of boisterous bullocks, while the harsh winters led to a myriad of hardships. Adversity, however, was balanced by the tranquillity of the summers, the spring and summer flow of the Avonmore river, and the quiet kindness of the majority of the people the family met. This is a quiet but heart-warming memoir, shot through with dry humour.
Vincent Banville