An even finer achievement than her earlier mordant masterpiece, GOOD BEHAVIOUR' Sunday Times
In 1914, when Nicandra is eight, all is well in the grand Irish estate, Deer Forest. Maman is beautiful and adored. Dada, silent and small, mooches contendedly around the stables. Aunt Tossie, of the giant heart and bosom, is widowed but looks splendid in weeds. The butler, the groom, the landsteward, the maids, the men - each as a place and knows it. Then, astonishingly, the perfect surface is shattered; Maman does something too dreadful ever to be spoken of.
'What next Who to love ' asks Nicaranda. And through her growing up and marriage her answer is to swamp those around her with kindness - while gradually the great house crumbles under a weight of manners and misunderstanding.
Molly Keane is astonishing ... LOVING AND GIVING is perhaps her richest work yet, an exquisitely written black comedy with a shock ending. The language is eloquent and original, the descriptions divine - GUARDIAN
This novel is a rare treat - IRISH TIMES
Quite the best book she has written - DAILY TELEGRAPH
Molly Keane is astonishing ... LOVING AND GIVING is perhaps her richest work yet, an exquisitely written black comedy with a shock ending. The language is eloquent and original, the descriptions divine - GUARDIAN
This novel is a rare treat - IRISH TIMES
Quite the best book she has written - DAILY TELEGRAPH
Molly Keane (1904-1996) was an Irish novelist and playwright. She grew up at Ballyrankin in County Wexford and was educated at a boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow. She married Bobby Keane, one of a Waterford squirearchical family in 1938 and had two daughters.
She used her married name for her later novels, several of which (Good Behaviour, Time After Time) have been adapted for television. Between 1928 and 1956, she wrote eleven novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell. Her husband died suddenly in 1946, and following the failure of a play she published nothing for twenty years. In 1981, Good Behaviour came out under her own name. The novel was warmly received and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.