I read this on the page as well as with an audio arc from Netgalley, and I must say, the audio production was sublime for this one. What a fantastic narrator.

This is a simple story with not that much of a plot. But that is very deceptive. A British painter comes to a remote Irish island in, from what I can tell, some months in 1979, to paint the cliffs. At the same time, a French academic writing a book on the dying language spoken there is the only other outsider. A grandmother, her daughter, her son, and the porter are the predominant cast. The mere presence of the Englishmen, solitary as he may perceive himself, begins to upset the dynamics and patterns of the people—including the study the Frenchmen is conducting.

Much of the prose is interior, which mimics the thinking of the Frenchmen and Englishmen for most of the book. Stream-of-consciousness that elucidates their history while showcasing their either lateral jumps in thought process or else emotional contusions run aground in long paragraphs that feel like worries and rants and the chunks of time that they are. It’s very personality-heavy prose work, that drips off the lines.

In a very subtle way, the weeks go by, and seemingly not that much happens. Only the events will alter some of peoples’ futures forever. Who and how that happens is a byproduct of the colonization and thinking ingrained from root to stem. Who is agitated and why, and what they do about it. Who has compassion for what, versus decried, spin-on, and attacked. And the responsibility for actions continually eschewed and replicated.

It’s a fascinating character study and a chilling tale. Especially as tensions grow with the interspersed news reports being relayed to the reader, while the characters comment on them often as well, especially later on. Absolutely brilliant bit of fiction.