When All Is Said by Anne Griffin

by Anne Griffin (Sceptre)

Reviewer: Donal O’Donoghue

This novel, one of the most touted Irish ction debuts of 2019, is a love story that will undoubtedly charm many as it has already charmed champions like Graham Norton, John Boyne and Donal Ryan. Indeed it is the latter’s work that is most reminiscent of this rural tale of a recently widowed farmer, Maurice Hannigan, toasting the ve people who mattered most to him in his long life.

Now 84 years old, the wealthy farmer sits at the bar of the local hotel, a place of memories, to raise a glass to the quintet, including his brother, Tony and his wife Sadie who is just two years dead. Sadness and joy beat against each other in these remembrances, each marked with a carefully chosen tipple, over an evening that grows with import and emotional heft as Maurice reels in a life of achievement shaded with no little regret and remorse.

It’s a love story, or a Pater Noster of love stories, each linking into the other, spooling out the decades of Hannigan’s life, from his country childhood in County Meath to his footloose courting days to the hard graft of making his fortune. In the middle of it all is the moment that changed his future forever. Gri n’s novel chimes closely with the pastoral landscapes of Donal Ryan’s, even if the focus is softer and the prose not as pared and purposeful. The writing is similarly beguiling and empathetic, a warm and nourishing story from a writer of much promise.