Manhattan loneliness of woman who never finds her voice

Mary Costello's much praised first book, The China Factory, a collection of short stories, was nominated for The Guardian first book award. This book is her first novel, the story of a lone Irish woman emigrant living in America in the middle of the last century. The novel covers Tess's life from when we first meet her as a child in a farmhouse in the West of Ireland in the 1940s as her mother is being buried until we last meet her, when she returns to the same farmhouse having lived most of her adult life in New York.