“In the top floor room of the dilapidated townhouse across the Terrace, a light has been on all night.”

O’CONNOR becomes the first writer in this blog to have two books listed in the 101 lists. No apologies there. As the title implies this is a haunting book.

It is a love story that slowly, slowly reveals itself and its beginnings with the first traumatic performance of J.M Synge’s Playboy of the Western World in Dublin 1907.

He writes in the second person ie “You are 65 now” which gives it a brotherly-sisterly intimacy. An aching, non judgemental sadness. O’Connor says in the acknowledgements that he grew up a mile away from the house where Synge died but the historical skeleton on which it hangs is only shuffled in later.

It is a star biography of a star without star cliches, of a time – up to 1952 – and era and a politic and mores which invites you to know more which if you are not Dublin Irish you might not…