VISITOR, THE

When The Springs of Affection, Maeve Brennan's collection of Dublin stories, was published in 1997, the poet Eamon Grennan called it a classic, a book that placed Brennan "among the best Irish short-story writers since Joyce". It was followed by The Rose Garden, which collected all of Brennan's remaining short stories -- fiction so good that one critic, Katherine Powers of the Boston Globe, "kept putting the book down to postpone] the evil hour when the stories would be done".Now, quite unexpectedly, Brennan's oeuvre is immeasurably deepened and broadened by one last book -- a novella, till now unpublished, written in the 1940s. Recently discovered in a university archive, it is the early work of a mature artist -- a further story of Dublin, and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temper. It is complete and of a piece with her greatest short stories.

The Visitor is the haunting tale of Anastasia King, who, at the age of twenty-two, returns to her grandmother's house -- the very house where she grew up -- after six long years away. She had been in Pans, comforting her disgraced and dying mother, the runaway from a disastrous marriage to Anastasia's late father, the grandmother's only son. "It's a pity she sent for you, Anastasia", the grandmother says, "and a pity you went after her. It broke your father's heart". Anastasia pays dearly for the choice she made, a choice that now costs her own strong sense of family and makes her an exile -- a visitor -- in the place she once called home.