A lyrical account of love let slip

Fiction: When Light Is Like Water, By Molly McCloskey, Penguin Ireland, €14.95

Molly McCloskey Pic: Getty

To read a Molly McCloskey book is to walk into a dense thicket of lyricism. There are impressive moments on almost every page of her work, which hit a particular height back in 2011, when she published Circles Around The Sun, a memoir about her schizophrenic brother Mike. Clear-eyed and exquisite, her account of her Irish-American family singled her out as one to watch.

That book revealed that in her younger years, McCloskey ...