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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Copyright © Anne Bennett 2000
First published in 2000 by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs © Gordon Crabb (woman); John Topham /TopFoto (street scene).
Anne Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007547807
Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007547814
Version: 2017-09-08
I am dedicating this book to Denis
for the immense help and unfailing support he has given me over the years. Thank you.
Table of Contents
Maeve Brannigan couldn’t believe she was actually leaving the little farm in Donegal where she’d lived all of her eighteen years. It had been worth the cajoling and pleading, her mother’s tears and her father’s bad humour that had made him moody and snappy with them all. She’d survived it all, as well as the old biddies in the parish, who’d prophesied that no good would come of it, and did she think she ought to go when, after all, she was such a grand help to her mother, for wasn’t the woman herself always saying so?
Maeve had been brought up to have manners and it had only been that innate politeness that had stopped her screaming abuse at the interfering old gossips. Did they think she didn’t know all that? She was the eldest of seven and even when Maeve had begun work in the grocery store in the town when she