After a road accident O'Leary Montagu wakes two weeks later, scarred and amnesiac, a new name looking at the blank page of a new life. Two women have sustained ... » 

After a road accident O'Leary Montagu wakes two weeks later, scarred and amnesiac, a new name looking at the blank page of a new life. Two women have sustained him since: Mary, the nurse who took him in when the hospital ran out of patience, and Nancy Valentine, author of Ill Fares the Land. Her memoir of an idyllic childhood in Kilbrack, with its cast of idiosyncratic characters - Nellie McGuire in her pub, stout Mrs Cuthbert and thin old Mr Downey - ends in the return to the village after sudden, inexplicable banishment to find it abandoned, in utter desolation and ruin.O'Leary decides to seek out the place, but it is not abandoned at all. What has happened to Kilbrack? «