The Dazzling Truth

When Maeve Morelli, a just-arrived Brooklyn student, meets Murtagh Moone outside Trinity College, Dublin, it starts a saga that will stay with readers long after they have followed the family’s trail from 1978 to 2015. Murtagh, a potter, and Maeve, an aspiring actress, fall hard for each other and are quickly married and then move to Inis Óg, an island off the west coast of Ireland, where they raise twin sons and two daughters. The book opens with a search for Maeve, whose body washes ashore with stones in her pockets. The effect of the suicide on each family member and on the clan as a whole is perfectly drawn by Cullen (The Lost Letters of William Woolf), an Irish author living in London, whose time away has not dimmed her ability to write pitch-perfect rural Irish conversations and characters. Maeve’s depression hangs over the book, but love is here in spades, too, and the twist in devotion that Murtagh takes to close the story is just right.