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    The Secrets of Roscarbury Hall: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Secrets of Roscarbury Hall: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Secrets of Roscarbury Hall: A Novel
    Ebook327 pages4 hours

    The Secrets of Roscarbury Hall: A Novel

    By Ann O'Loughlin

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A bestseller in the UK, this moving debut novel is a modern Philomena story of love, both lost and found.

    Secrets can’t last forever. . . .

    In a crumbling mansion in a small Irish village in County Wicklow, two elderly sisters, Ella and Roberta O’Callaghan, live alone in Roscarbury Hall with their secrets, memories, and mutual hatred. Long estranged, the two communicate only by terse notes. But when the sisters are threatened with bankruptcy, Ella defies Roberta’s wishes and converts the mansion's old ballroom into a café.

    Much to Roberta’s displeasure, the café is a hit and the sisters are reluctantly drawn back into the village life they abandoned decades ago. But gossip has a long life. As the local convent comes under scrutiny, the O’Callaghan sisters find themselves caught up in an adoption scandal that dates back to the 1960s and spreads all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

    Only by overcoming their enmity and facing up to the past can they face the future together—but can they finally put their differences behind them? 
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateOct 4, 2016
    ISBN9781510713734
    Author

    Ann O'Loughlin

    Ann O’Loughlin is an internationally bestselling author and a leading journalist in Ireland covering all major news events of the past three decades, including the Irish orphan scandal. She was a security correspondent at the height of the Troubles and was a senior journalist at the Irish Independent and Evening Herald. She is currently a senior journalist with the Irish Examiner newspaper covering legal issues. She lives on the east coast of Ireland with her husband and two children.

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    Reviews for The Secrets of Roscarbury Hall

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Found this in a long-neglected TBR collection on my Kindle and jumped in without checking the blurb - I was expecting something slightly perkier than forced adoptions and terminal illness! Raised in Ohio, Debbie Kading travels to Ireland after discovering that she was adopted from a convent in County Wicklow. While waiting on answers from the nuns, Debbie meets Ella O'Callaghan who has recently opened a small café in the dilapidated mansion she shares, grudgingly, with her sister. The house is not only falling down around their ears but also mortgaged to the hilt and the bank is threatening to repossess the family home. Debbie agrees to help out and even suggests that Ella move the café to the derelict ballroom, which of course is an instant success (the legal aspect of setting up a business which serves food is lampshaded and then dismissed). Both Debbie and Ella share dark family secrets connected to the terrible - and very real - practice of forced adoptions in the 1950s and 1960s, where babies were taken from mothers considered to be 'unsuitable' and passed onto adoptive families. Debbie's desperate quest for the truth about her own mother causes Ella to relive the painful loss of her two children and the betrayal which caused the decades-long rift with her sister Roberta.After adjusting to the dark subject matter, I was gripped by the storyline and loved the descriptions of the house, Roscarbury Hall. The terse and disjointed pacing of the narrative, however, prevented me from really getting to know the characters aside from revelations about the past. There was something off about the flow of the writing which made a 300 page novel read like the author was still at the plotting stage. Abrupt delivery aside, I loved how the little community of Rathsorney, full of old friends, gossips and unspoken truths, came together to support each other in the end.Not what I thought I was getting, but a swift and engrossing read which helped pass an afternoon.