THE COAST ROAD

In Ardglas, a small Irish town, women are struggling with their marriages and their choices in the mid-1990s.

Three wives in particular are the focus of Murrin’s debut, which looks empathetically on the women’s cramped lives and options. Izzy Keaveney has been fighting, off and on, with her husband, James, for more than 20 years and suffers periods of depression. Frustrated that James gave away the lease to her florist business and now refuses to buy it back, she’s recently found a more simpatico male presence in the form of parish priest Father Brian Dempsey. Dolores Mullen, mother of three and pregnant again, has long endured the cruelty and promiscuity of her husband, Donal, who constantly demeans and criticizes her. Poet Colette Crowley took the unusual step of leaving her husband, Shaun, and their three sons to have an affair in Dublin. But now she’s back, regretful, short of cash, and keen to make amends with the children. (The unavailability of divorce in Ireland during the main part of the book is intrinsic to the story.) The friendship that forms between Izzy and Colette also becomes a vehicle for Colette to spend time secretly with her youngest child, but when Shaun finds out, he strikes back. Meanwhile, Donal is sleeping with Colette, and James, threatened by the intimacy between Izzy and Brian, uses his heft as a politician to have the priest removed from the parish. The wives are the fuller characters in Murrin’s gloomy depiction of a stifling, gossipy, traditional community, whereas the men, Brian excepted, emerge badly and more thinly. Colette, falling apart, and Izzy, taking a stand, personify the extremes of their options, one ultimately tragic, the other more accommodating, in a downbeat story, closely observed but shaded with a heavy hand.

Overstatement detracts from this compassionate depiction of hard times.