Photographs and Souvenirs

PHOTOGRAPHS AND SOUVENIRS Still in the twilight of her beauty, but drained of love for her alcoholic husband, Stella Ryan falls into a trap of deliverance set by a coarse but young and handsome opportunist while her two boys Lou and Joe, missing the father they adore, befriend a combat vet who, secretly tormented by his role in the war against the Japanese in the South Pacific, enters their lives on a mission to protect them from the predator he suspects is out to trade their mother's life for her money. "Patrick Leahy's Photographs and Souvenirs is among the finest achievements I've read in recent years, a gripping and beautifully nuanced story of a family in deepest turmoil. The prose is quiet and then, in moments, breathlessly raw; the story, delivered in vivid, tensile prose, is utterly compelling and exposes with almost surgical precision the deepest and most complex aspects of human interaction. Patrick Leahy is a remarkably gifted writer and this novel deserves a wide, enthusiastic audience." Billy O'Callaghan Irish Book Award winner, 2013 Book critic/reviewer, Irish Examiner