The Disenchanted Widow, Christina McKenna
The Disenchanted Widow, Christina McKenna
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The Disenchanted Widow

Author: Christina McKenna

Narrator: Anne Flosnik

Unabridged: 9 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Published: 08/27/2013

Synopsis

It’s 1981 and Belfast is burning. So, too, is freshly widowed Bessie Halstone: she burns with a desire to break with her troubled past. With her feckless husband gone, she leaves home hurriedly with her naughty nine-year-old son, Herkie, and not much else. The Dentist, an IRA enforcer, is on her tail. He’s convinced that Bessie, with her “yella hair all puffed up like Merlin Monroe’s,” has absconded with the takings from a bank heist.But car trouble strands mother and son in Tailorstown, a sleepy Ulster village. Bessie finds temporary work as housekeeper for the handsome and mysterious parish priest. In the meantime, Lorcan Strong, an artist and a native of the village, is summoned home. He’s been shanghaied into forging paintings for the IRA. It’s work he cannot refuse; his mother and their business are under threat.Yet things are not what they seem in quirky Tailorstown. There is a “sleeper” in the village. But who? Bizarrely, it is young Herkie, due to his childish curiosity, who unravels the mystery and saves the day.

About Christina McKenna

Christina McKenna is a graduate of Belfast College of Art, where she gained an honors degree in fine art, and later a postgraduate degree in English from the University of Ulster. An accomplished painter and novelist, McKenna has exhibited her art internationally and in Ireland, and taught art and English for ten years. She is the author of the highly praised memoir My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress, as well as the nonfiction books The Dark Sacrament and Ireland's Haunted Women, and a previous Tailorstown novel, The Misremembered Man. She currently lives in Northern Ireland with her husband, the author David M. Kiely, with whom she collaborates on occasion.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Elaine on October 30, 2014

I am torn between a 3 and a 4 for this one, but going to go with my initial instincts and give it a 4. In most ways I really enjoyed this return to Tailorstown, which we first visited in The Misremembered Man, although this read is less “gentle” than the first one. Tailorstown is a very sleepy backw......more

Goodreads review by Karen on April 16, 2017

A bit laboured in parts but altogether a nice tale......more

Goodreads review by Georgina on August 22, 2022

This book moves on in time to the first. It still encapsulate the idea of a naive, church dominated rural Ireland set against the harsh realities of the troubles that were and remain dominant there. They appear to coexist;they know they are there but the inhabitants in the main appear to ignore it,......more

Goodreads review by Candida on June 03, 2016

The story of Tailorstown resumes seven years later in THE DISENCHANTED WIDOW. Bombshell Bessie Lawless of Belfast is on the run with her nine-year-old son, Herkie. Prior to being killed in an automobile collision, her abusive thug of a husband, Packie, steals £10,000 from The Dentist, an IRA enforce......more

Goodreads review by Bud on July 16, 2014

I giggled. I giggled out loud, I even laughed out loud. To suggest there are a few ludicrous situations, a kid who can't keep his nose out of trouble, and the fracturing of the 'English' language - accents or not - doesn't give the plot away, but you are warned. You will end up liking these people, an......more

Quotes

“I’ve been racking my brain to pounce on at least one minor flaw in The Disenchanted Widow, Christina McKenna’s riveting account of a new widow and her 9-year-old son fleeing the IRA in 1980s Belfast, and all in vain. So I have no recourse but to succumb to the pleasures of her prose.” —Dan Dervin, The Free Lance-Star“I was guessing throughout the book…fast paced.” —Night Owl Reviews (4 stars)

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