Conversation Piece

Molly Keane

Little, Brown Book Group, May 2, 2013 - Fiction - 304 pages

FOR FANS OF JANE AUSTEN AND NANCY MITFORD

'She was . . . marvellous' GUARDIAN

'I admired many authors. But Molly, I loved' DIANA ATHILL

'A writer of genius' WALL STREET JOURNAL

When Oliver visits Pullinstown, he is introduced to wild days of hunting and shooting, and to characters like his cousins, with their passion for horses and trickery, and Sir Richard, elderly, but a match for his headstrong offspring.

In this early novel by Molly Keane, the high romance and disarray of the vanished Anglo-Irish world is evoked with humour, nostalgia, and undercurrents of powerful feeling.

The author has also written under the pseudonym, M. J. Farrell.

About the author

Molly Keane (1904-1996) was an Irish novelist and playwright. She grew up at Ballyrankin in County Wexford and was educated at a boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow. She married Bobby Keane, one of a Waterford squirearchical family in 1938 and had two daughters.

She used her married name for her later novels, several of which (Good Behaviour, Time After Time) have been adapted for television. Between 1928 and 1956, she wrote eleven novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell. Her husband died suddenly in 1946, and following the failure of a play she published nothing for twenty years. In 1981, Good Behaviour came out under her own name. The novel was warmly received and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Conversation Piece; Virago Modern Classics
• Author: Molly Keane
• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group, 2013
• ISBN: 1405526912, 9781405526913
• Length: 304 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Family Life / General; Fiction / General; Fiction / Women