Another Kind of Life

Another Kind of Life

by Catherine Dunne

Picador $101

Ireland's Catherine Dunne was inspired to write this perceptive and absorbing novel after seeing a family photograph, taken around 1898, of her grandmother Elizabeth, then 18, wearing a silk gown and a matinee hat made of feathers, fruits, roses and tulle. Elizabeth has been fictionalised as the character of Hannah in this novel, and, in this story, as in real life, she is married to a man of her parents' choosing - a man from Belfast, some 20 years older than his bride-to-be. Dunne explores what it must have been like for a sheltered, middle-class Dublin girl to be thrown into the heaving, grimy, industrial boom-town that was late 19th-century Belfast. The novel also imagines the lives of Hannah's younger sisters, May and Eleanor, and of two working class girls, Mary and Cecilia, who are struggling to make a living in the linen mills of Belfast.