The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually

THE IMMERSIVE AND HEARTFELT EXPLORATION OF FAMILY AND LOVE 'A beautiful bittersweet story of love, loss and families. Tears were shed!' GRAHAM NORTON 'A moving and powerful novel' JOHN BOYNE 'Human, graceful and healing, a true gift of a novel' SEBASTIAN BARRY 'A beautiful story' SARAH WINMAN 'Lyrical, optimistic and redemptive' CLARE CHAMBERS 'Just loved it . . . so moving on motherhood, depression, family ties and Ireland' ANNIE MACMANUS __________ On an island off the west coast of Ireland, the Moone family gathers. Maeve is an actor, struggling with her most challenging role yet - as a mother to four children. Murtagh, her devoted husband, is a potter whose craft brought them from the city to this rural life. In the wake of one fateful night, the Moone siblings must learn the story of who their parents truly are, and what has happened since their first meeting, years before, outside Trinity College in Dublin. We watch as one love story gives rise to another, until we arrive at a future that none of the Moones could have predicted. Except perhaps Maeve herself. The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually is a celebration of the complex, flawed and stubbornly optimistic human heart. __________ Longlisted for the Guardian's 'Not The Booker' prize PRAISE FOR THE TRUTH MUST DAZZLE GRADUALLY: 'I devoured this, falling in love with the setting and with every character. It is just glorious. A close-up on the everyday beautiful details that make up love' Emma Flint, author of Little Deaths 'Intensely moving, beautifully written and drenched with Irish atmosphere, this novel asks brave and thoughtful questions about mental health' Daily Mail 'Loved it. Beautiful and original' Sunday Independent 'Cullen is a thoughtful writer and she dissects the stubborn optimism of the human heart with skill and sympathy' Irish Independent 'A perfect combination of deeply-felt tragedy with great hopefulness' Anne Youngson, author of Meet me at the Museum 'Masterfully constructed. A book of rare quality' i Paper 'A beautifully observed saga of abandoned dreams, loss and self-discovery. A fabulous creation' Alan McGonagle, author of Ithaca 'So wonderful on the Irish family and the utter complexity of motherhood, family entanglement and love. I was full on weeping at the end' Elaine Feeney, author of As You Were

One Irish family. Three decades. One dazzling story. “A love letter to family and to the arts. Beautiful.” —Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones In the courtyards of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1978, aspiring actress Maeve meets pottery student Murtagh Moone. As their relationship progresses, marriage and motherhood come in quick succession, but for Maeve, with the joy of children also comes the struggle to hold on to the truest parts of herself. Decades later, on a small Irish island, the Moone family are poised for celebration but instead are struck by tragedy. Each family member must find solace in their own separate way, until one dazzling truth brings them back together. But as the Moone family confront the past, they also journey toward a future that none of them could have predicted. Except perhaps Maeve herself. “A perfect combination of deeply felt tragedy with great hopefulness.” —Anne Youngson, author of Meet Me at the Museum

"The truth must dazzle gradually," wrote Emily Dickinson. Here is an account of the first 20 years of an unwanted "only" child entrusted by the legal system in 1920s and 1930s America to the divorcing female parent. It was evoked by a the television film Sybil, a study of a woman transformed by years of physical and emotional abuse by her parents. By considering the scant professional literature of the complex subject and her first twenty years, Dr. Wheeler critiques the genesis of making one's way out of a potentially crippling life. Part of this process is an attempt to account for her parents' behavior by examining their early lives. There is evidence that on the scale of childhood trauma, divorce is second only to parental death, a long-lasting and wrenching experience for many. The quality of the mother-child relationship is the single most critical factor in determining how children feel about themselves in the post-divorce decade and how well they function in the domains of their lives. Fictional kids of scripted media are typically armed with built-in insights referred to as self-esteem and courage. Snapshot memories employed by this author demonstrate great inequities associated with the one child/one custodian arrangement. The mother's objective shifted from unloading, to controlling, to capturing the adult daughter. The author, who is not opposed to divorce, began to make her way out, in two senses: discernment and change.

THE STORY: In her Amherst, Massachusetts home, the reclusive nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson recollects her past through her work, her diaries and letters, and a few encounters with significant people in her life. William Luce’s classic play shows us both the pain and the joy of Dickinson’s secluded life.

“Enchanting, intriguing, deeply moving. The Lost Letters of William Woolf concerns itself as much with lost love as it does with lost letters.” —Irish Times *** Lost letters have only one hope for survival... Inside the walls of the Dead Letters Depot, letter detectives work to solve mysteries. They study missing zip codes, illegible handwriting, rain-smudged ink, lost address labels, torn packages, forgotten street names—all the many twists of fate behind missed birthdays, broken hearts, unheard confessions, pointless accusations, unpaid bills, unanswered prayers. Their mission is to unite lost mail with its intended recipients. But when letters arrive addressed simply to “My Great Love,” longtime letter detective William Woolf faces his greatest mystery to date. Written by a woman to the soulmate she hasn’t met yet, the missives capture William’s heart in ways he didn’t know possible. Soon, he finds himself torn between the realities of his own marriage and his world of letters, and his quest to follow the clues becomes a life-changing journey of love, hope, and courage. From Irish author Helen Cullen, The Lost Letters of William Woolf is an enchanting novel about the resilience of the human heart and the complex ideas we hold about love—and a passionate ode to the art of letter writing.