The everyday complications of village life are very different from the challenges Fingal faced nearly thirty years earlier, when, fresh out of medical school, the young Dr. O'Reilly accepted a post at the Aungier Street Dispensary, tending to the impoverished denizens of Dublin's tenement slums. Shifting back and forth between the present and the past, Patrick Taylor's captivating new novel brings to life both the green young man O'Reilly once was and the canny village doctor readers have come to know and admire.