Molly McCloskey

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning Irish writer MOLLY McCLOSKEY for a discussion of her first novel to be published in the United States, Straying. She will be joined in conversation by award-winning poet and novelist HA JIN.

Weather Update

Tonight's event is scheduled to proceed as planned, unaffected by the nor'easter. Any changes or updates will be noted here. (Updated 3/2)

About Straying

From “an extravagantly gifted writer who deserves to be widely read” (Rachel Cusk), this intimate, quietly stunning novel tells the story of a young American expat who settles in Ireland in the late 1980s, marries, and lives through the consequences of an affair.

Alice, a young American, arrives in the West of Ireland with no plans and no strong attachments—except to her beloved mother, who raised her on her own. Alice falls in love with an Irishman, marries him, and settles down in a place whose customs she struggles to understand. In the course of a single hot summer, she embarks on an affair that breaks her marriage and sets her life on a new course.

Years later, after working in war zones around the world, and in the immediate aftermath of her mother’s death, Alice finds herself back in Ireland and contemplating the forces that led her to put down roots and then tear them up again. What drew her to her husband, and what pulled her away? Was her husband strangely complicit in the affair? Was she always under surveillance by friends and neighbors who knew more than they let on?

“Molly McCloskey is one of Ireland’s finest writers” (Colum McCann) and Straying is at once a gripping account of passion and ambivalence and an exquisite rumination on the things that matter most: the definition of love, the value of family, and the meaning of home.

Praise

"The tale of an idle transgression turns into a profound meditation on love in this ferociously well-written novel . . . McCloskey writes with shattering insight on loss, and the way that it can make us feel tender towards the world." —The Guardian

"McCloskey describes everything with a luminous exactitude . . . It’s entirely beguiling." —Irish Daily Mail

"Straying is a powerful and deeply affecting novel in which the psychology of love and the anatomy of adultery are forensically examined. In writing that sparkles with intelligence and insight the ordinary moments of everyday existence are charged with a beauty and tenderness that render them only just bearable. It is a profound reflection on love, loss, mortality and how certain people in our lives—lovers, mothers, friends—alter us, as we slowly, painfully, try to beget our better selves." —Mary Costello, author of Academy Street and The China Factory