Little Rose McGinley is just seven years old when her family is evicted from their Donegal home, victims of the Clearances of 1861. It is the first step in a long journey for Rose, one that takes her from Donegal to Kerry, and back again to the North. But the feisty girl blossoms into a woman of character with courage and the determination to keep her family together, against all the odds.

Anne Doughty was born in Armagh. She is the author of A Few Late Roses (longlisted for the Irish Times fiction prize), Stranger in the Place and Summer of the Hawthorn. After many years in England she returned to Belfast in 1998 and wrote the first of a series of stand-alone novels that make up the Hamiltons sequence.