My Dream of You: Summary and book reviews of My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain, plus links to an excerpt from My Dream of You and a biography of Nuala O'Faolain.

Hailed by critics ("A beautiful exploration of human loneliness and happiness, of contentment and longing," wrote Alice McDermott in The Washington Post) and embraced by legions of readers, Nuala O'Faolain's memoir Are You Somebody? introduced a writer of exceptional insight, honesty, and compassion. These same gifts are evident in O'Faolain's grand first novel that tells of parallel lives, one hundred fifty years apart, driven by a hunger for passionate love. My Dream of You is the story of Kathleen de Burca, an Irish woman based in London, a travel writer who crisscrosses the globe. She is a woman on the run until a quick series of blows, on the eve of a milestone birthday, stops her cold -- revealing the painful cost of her refugee existence and the encroaching despair that the love she believed would deliver her might never come. And still, she feels, her heart is ridiculously alive. And so it is to passion that Kathleen turns when she sets out for Ireland to investigate the true story of a scandalous affair between the wife of an English landlord and an Irish servant during the latter years of the Famine. Between the lines of the historical record and through a reconsideration of the family she fled so long ago, Kathleen attempts to understand how it is that even in the face of adversity love can prevail and even with love families can be torn apart. During her time in the country, she encounters a lover of her own who helps her to know her own heart and presents her with an ultimate choice that, like the one made by her nineteenth-century lovers, promises to alter the course of her life. My Dream of You is a singular achievement: a feeling and captivating work that explores the extremes of passion, the depths of loneliness, and the resilience of the human heart.

Media Reviews

Library Journal The gossamer plot is forgivable because O'Faolain has infused her protagonist with such perfectly flawed humanity. The Irish Times columnist can, and will, do better work, but this novel-within-a-historical-novella merits purchase all the same.   Publisher's Weekly The humor, honesty and moral seriousness ... surpasses any historical recitation of the facts.

Recent Reader Reviews

Rated of 5 by Heather Nelson
I finished My Dream of You just two weeks ago, and I still find myself thinking about it ALL the time. It is extremely powerful, and having visited Ireland for the first time two years ago after dreaming of the country most of my adult...   Read More

Rated of 5 by Martha Mooney Waltien
It has been six months, now, since I read "My Dream of You", but I found the book to be beautifully written, elegant, beautifully crafted and one that you wish would go on and on. This is a truly great writer (an Irishwoman) and I also...   Read More

Rated of 5 by fran mitchell
There needs to be a way that good writers can transit from one time period to another and then back again to the now. That transition could be only a phrase or a melody but not the "jolt" that leaves a reader groping for the year and...   Read More

Review (not rated) by Anonymous
Karla Powell
Good book if you can keep different thoughts of the author together. She switches quite often to different thoughts in the book. Sad, somewhat depressing, of a lonely woman trying to find herself.
It was o.k.

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Books with similar themes

• Novels
  
• UK (Britain) & Ireland 
  
• Contemporary 
  
• 1st Books/1st Novels 
  
• Mid-Life Onwards 
  
• Immigrants & Expatriates