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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2000, 269 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2001, 270 pages
The breathtaking love story of a young woman's betrayal, a haunting portrait of the extraordinary beauty and inexorable violence of a divided Ireland.
In what will surely be his most acclaimed novel yet, Moran carries us to the harbor towns of southern Ireland. Una Moss is a bright, young medical student struggling for independence from the world of her family's secret loyalties. Aidan Ferrel is the man who wins her love, the stranger she chooses to trust. Water, Carry Me is the story of a singular love pitted against political passion--the chronicle of a young woman's journey from innocence to betrayal, across the vivid brightness and darkness that is the heartbreaking landscape of her beloved Ireland.
"Thomas Moran . . . can immerse you utterly in whatever moment he chooses to describe." --The New York Times Book Review
Chapter One
What if the world turned wrong one day and the deep sea gave up its dead?
What would we of the land's end spy? A hundred thousand pale corpses, bobbing like fishermen's floats in the green swell? Several millions, from chain-mailed Norman lords to the black-clad crews of Spanish galleons, from ladies in silk ballgowns who went down on liners to poor Connacht fishermen swept overboard in the lonely nights by sudden swinging booms? And flaunty yachtsmen, cocksure but capsized by white squalls, the implacable destroyers of pretty boats?
Would the endless waters become a sort of peat bog on which, stepping so carefully, we might walk from here all the way to America? Would the corpses' eyes be open, watching and resentful? Or would they be closed tight as a baby's at the moment of birth?
This isn't a decent vision. It's one I would not have. But it has been with me for years, sometimes asleep and sometimes awake.
The worst ever was the night I was loving my ...
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