The Good People

In the year 1825, in a remote valley lying between the mountains of south0west Ireland, near the Flesk river

of Killarney, three women are brought together by strange and troubling events.

Nóra Leahy has lost her daughter and her husband in the same year, and is now burdened with the care of

her four-year-old grandson, Micheál. The boy cannot walk, or speak, and Nora, mistrustful of the tongues of

gossips, has kept the child hidden from those who might see in his deformity evidence of otherworldly

interference.

Unable to care for the child alone, Nóra hires a fourteen-year-old servant girl, Mary, who soon hears the

whispers in the valley about the blasted creature causing grief to fall upon the widow's house.

Alone, hedged in by rumour, Mary and her mistress seek out the only person in the valley who might be

able to help Micheál. For although her neighbours are wary of her, it is said that old Nance Roche has the

knowledge. That she consorts with Them, the Good People. And that only she can return those whom they

have taken . . .

‘The Good People takes us straight to a place utterly unexpected and believable, where amidst the earnest

mayhem people impose on each other, there is no patronising quaintness, but a compelling sense of the

inevitability of solemn horrors.

’

Winner of the Booker Prize and Miles Franklin Literary Award –