The Banyan Tree - Softcover

On an overgrown and rundown farm in Ireland in the late 1980s widowed Minnie O¿Brien (a shopkeeper¿s daughter in the village) remembers the past: courtship and marriage to craftsman-farmer Peter, the lover of her life, whom she met at a country fair; their wedding and Dublin honeymoon in 1922; life on the farm; the births of three children; and what became of them. Brendan goes off to be a missionary in Africa; Sheila is a nurse at Guy¿s hospital; Frankie seeks freedom in the Australian outback. Between the turf-cutting and roof-laying, ceilidhs and hurling matches of her early married days and the ¿modern¿ age of mains electricity and ¿airoplaines¿ lie well-worn footpaths of reminiscence down which Minnie rambles contentedly as she waits for her men to come home.

Christy Nolan was born in Mullingar, Ireland, on 6 September 1965. Unable to talk, walk or use his hands due to cerebal palsy, he could communicate only via a special computer and keyboard, using a so-called 'unicorn stick' to painstakingly tap each letter as his mother cradled his head. He published his first book, a collection of poetry called A Dam-burst of Dreams, in 1981. In 1987, he published an autobiographical novel, Under the Eye of the Clock, which won the Whitbread Award. A stage version of the novel, called Torchlight and Laser Beams and written with the theatre director Michael Scoot, was shown at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988. His next novel, The Banyan Tree, was published in 1999 by Orion. Christy Nolan died in Dublin on 20 February, 2009. At the time of his death he was working on another novel, which remains unfinished.