In 1921, author Edith Somerville is trying to enjoying her later years in life, while attempting to turn her novels into a stage play - all the while regularly communicating with her deceased writing partner Martin Ross from beyond the veil. But Edith's pleasurable existence is being interrupted by the Irish War of Independence, and unfortunately as part of the wealthy upperclass with ties to England, Edith's ancestral home is often a target for IRA raids.

This was a pleasant and interesting reading experience for me. I knew next to nothing about Edith Somerville or her writing so it was nice to read about her, in a novel with her own POV, and she was a striking, independent woman who did feel very ahead of her time. There were of course times that Edith showed her class when it came to snobbery and a certain 'looking down her nose' at different types of people but overall I found her a fun character to spend some time with and I say she was a force to be reckoned with in real life.

I also appreciated seeing the Irish War of Independence from the other side of things, as I - probably like many other Irish people with a foot in the past - often tend to romanticise the fight for Irish freedom and the boys who followed the Big Fella Mick Collins when of course, like in any other kind of fighting, there is always good and bad people on both sides (except the Black and Tans, I'm convinced they were all bad) and we see the IRA men say and do some vicious things in this book and act very cruelly towards older people in their home.

This is a book full of literary people and playwrights and I also enjoyed the characterisation of George Bernard Shaw, and all his eccentricities (the scenes in which he insists on driving his own motor car, and flattening a flower bed while reversing are very funny indeed).

This is a very well told novel which I would like to think did a great justice to the powerful figure of Edith Somerville, as she was very big for me and felt like she could step off the page very much like her own character Flurry does for her during the course of the novel. I also love that I have a new list of books to try out from an Irish classic writer I knew little about before.