This author of this book is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter, and was Literary Editor at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1976-77. This is his first novel.

'She was too old for you,' TJ Quill's friend Liz says about his Italian mistress. 'Not that old,' TJ protests. 'At least two thousand years,' Liz says. 'Two-thousand-year-old' Josie might be untameable - a slippery madonna who presents a different face to each beholder - but she's often left standing by the rest of TJ's friends. Perhaps it is true that, as the Kerry poet Oozer Kenirons declares, the Irish are only three generations away from the old bog road, the tenement and back lane, and are busy re-inventing themselves. Certainly the cast of this novel are forever surprising each other - and themselves.

TJ's progress through a doomed friendship with 'Thorn' Thornton imbrangles him in the staging of a Plautus satire, retitled 'Lust' and performed at night on a hurricane-whipped bog, as well as the most traumatic awards dinner of TJ's chequered career. His affair with Josie drags him from the clandestine dinners in Dublin to the high drama of a ransom mission in Florence. His job as an archivist to great Western filmmaker Sean O'Fearna involves him in nailbiting interactions with the fearsome Widow O'Fearna.

And throughout this novel there plays out the story of TJ's foundering marriage to the enigmatic but never-to-be-understood Greta: a marriage that moves from couplehood in a cottage to uneasy truce in a Martello tower, and reaches its crisis with a car's night-time plunge into the sea.