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As he did so masterfully in the connected novellas of The Hill Road, Patrick O'Keeffe's first novel moves back and forth in time and place to weave the story of two Irish families forever linked by love, secrets, and their heritage.
James Dwyer was born in rural county Limerick before moving to Dublin as a teenager and ultimately settling in Ann Arbor. One night James's past appears in the form of a down-and-out man named Walter, who issues an invitation for James to come to Upstate New York to visit his old childhood neighbor, Kevin Lyons. Although neither James nor Kevin particularly cares for each other, there's no denying their complicated past. Kevin and James's sister, Tess, were lovers while James fell hard for Kevin's sister, Una.
Illuminating the precarious balance of family intimacies and how stories can carry over from one generation to the next, O'Keeffe's The Visitors further delivers on the elegant prose and plotting that earned him critical acclaim and the Story Prize for The Hill Road.
"Starred Review. The very air Jimmy breathes seems rife with memory - not only his, but his family's - pregnant with the secrets of those who went before him. By the time all is revealed, the reader is captivated and moved." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. O'Keeffe closely observes human interactions and conveys his narrative largely through glistening dialogue that has the feel of Celtic folk poetry." - Kirkus
"[O'Keeffe] weaves a poignant tale of hope and loss that is colorful and engaging in its detail and highly recommended." - Booklist
"O'Keeffe paints a picture of self-centered introspection, Irish gloom, and the ironic repetition of events from generation to generation that will appeal to most fiction readers." - Library Journal
"How well Patrick O'Keeffe knows the difficulties of leaving the past behind. I am full of admiration for his long view of history and family and the way he gradually reveals both in this wonderfully intelligent novel. The Visitors is a work of many pleasures." - Margot Livesey
"In Patrick O'Keeffe's The Visitors, the past is constantly catching up to, and overtaking, the present, and the result is this haunted and beautiful book that culminates in violence that's both inevitable and surprising. A wonderful first novel." - Charles Baxter
"The tangle of family life - the perils of escape, the perils of staying - is written into a novel of rare emotional authenticity." - Joan Silber
This information about The Visitors was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Patrick O'Keeffe emigrated from Ireland to the United States in the mid-1980s. He is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and earned a MFA from the University of Michigan. He now teaches at Ohio University and lives in Athens, Ohio.
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