The "Hill Road" marks the debut of an original and exciting new voice in Irish Fiction. Writing in the tradition of William Trevor and John McGahern, Patrick O'Keeffe has created a vision of rural Ireland in four unforgettable novellas, linked by setting and circumstance, that is clear-eyed, evocative, humorous and true. The townland of Kilkelly is at risk of being trapped for ever in an earlier version of itself, a time when shell-shocked soldiers returned from the trenches, and convent orphans could be billeted as servants with poor farmers; a time when a glamorous Irish American finds her liberated ways mean flirting is flirting with death, and a chance meeting on a train means the postman's widow must face the past she has always sidestepped. Patrick O'Keeffe's Ireland is a precarious world where time and landscape are forceful characters, but it is also a place of natural beauty, of laughter, of family closeness, a place where stories can change lives.