Woodbrook

wonderful book.Stays with you long after finishing it.It's set in the 30's and 40's in Co. Roscommon, in the rural west of Ireland. The locale is Woodbrook, a house and farm located between Boyle and Carrick-on-Shannon. The house is occupied by the Kirkwoods, a declining Anglo-Irish family, once wealthy and powerful, now living in a poorly maintained house and chased by creditors. Other characters in the book are the neighbouring local Irish, who work on the farm.The book is about loss; firstly, the doomed platonic love affair beteeen the author (in his teens and twenties) and Phoebe, his student, who is 7 years younger, and secondly, the inevitable decay of the house and lands.The book was written 30 years after the event and so is somewhat rose-tinted. The author admitted that he burned his notebooks in Woodbrook in a fit of jealousy, when Phoebe went off with a friend of the author, and so he had to rely on memory when writing the book. Naturally, as he admits, many of the un-pleasant aspects were forgotten.The book reminded me, in parts, of McEwan's "Atonement" and somewhat less of Sebald's " Austerlitz" but I think "Woodbrook" was superior.The book gives one insight of how the Anglo-Irish families lived between the two world wars.

The book was recommended to me by someone who was researching some of our ancestors from Co. Roscommon, Ireland. A distant Frazer cousin, Edward, married Mary Kirkwood, a daughter of Thomas Kirkwood of Woodbrook in 1834. Although David Thomson comes over as something of a 'wimp', he was, undoubtedly a very good historian. 'Woobrook' paints a fascinating story of the gradual decline of a prominent Anglo-Irish family in the 19th and 20th centuries. The author pays particular attention to the effects of the Penal Laws and the Famine on the Catholic families who worked on the estate.. A good, and from a genealogist's point of view, a very useful read.(My copy of the book was an Amazon Verified Purchase.)

As other reviewers have indicated this was possibly a good book for those wishing for a genial brush with rural Irish social culture, but personally I found myself bogged down in a mire of too much historical patter.The cover blurb promised intrigue: an 18 year-old live-in private tutor strikes up a relationship with Phoebe his eleven-year-old pupil, and a loving bond grows between them.But for me, there were too many distracting deviations relating to Irish history and to seemingly inconsequential other family members. Only when the social customs impinged directly upon the author did the story become absorbing. Until the final two chapters we were never allowed to glimpse the tender moments hinted at in the advertised description.Being based on a real-life experience I guess too much truth may have resulted in indelible incrimination for the author, who was later to become an award-winning writer for one of his subsequent publications.Other comparable novels consider similar age-divergent relationships more explicitly. Compared with the five-star  Sudie , Tideland , The Belvedere Field (Vanguard) , or  Still She Haunts Me , I can only award this three stars.

Woodbrook has stayed with me since I first read it ten years ago - it's one of the only books I find myself frequently recommending to others. David Thomson's descriptions of the summers at Woodbrook and the characters he met and heard about are very simple, and convey utterly the experience of enjoying a time in innocence which you will look back on with grief for its passing. He also tells the fascinating and tormented history of the region around the house of Woodbrook and its people, through the famine to the Second World War. And of course it is a love story (which would in almost any other circumstances put me off) - one whose history is almost unbearably poignant. I could hardly do anything for several hours after I finished it, totally dazed, and haunted.

This is one of the most beautifully written accounts of relations with an Anglo-Irish family written by an ethnic Englishman that I have ever read. It is insightful, sensitive and balanced. Additionally it is a tender love story laced with innocence and hope.I purchased it as a gift for my cousin.

Nice book, good condition, came promptly.

Very interesting read on a period often overlooked.

Found this a laborious read I'm afraid. I wanted to like it.