The girl of this story is a clairvoyant. To the other children in the local National School, she is an ‘imbissil’, a creature of the margins. But she is a lightning-conductor for all that happens in one small Irish country town and through her are channeled all the dreams and desires of its exuberant inhabitants. The girl’s grandmother, lives in a beech tree, ‘screeching, singing … fragments constantly spilling out of her memory-box’; Vera McGettrick’s fiance blows his head off a week before their wedding; Liz Duffy, the ‘apostate’ who marries a protestant (‘the other crowd’), is denounced as a ‘slut, whore and rip’; and the lovelorn ghost of Dockery the draper, is ‘still to be seen fishing on winter evenings’. Potently charged with historical echoes, eroticism, literary allusion and wild humour, Story of a Girl takes the reader on a rollercoaster voyage into a kaleidoscopic world of pure, unfettered language. Here, lyrical English, visions, snatches of song and bursts of Irish combine to harness the very pulse of life, engaging the reader’s attention on every shimmering page.