Firefly Summer » (Reprint)

As an author, Binchy's goal is simple: to let the story shine through. She told Oprah Winfrey, "I do not have a particular literary style, I am not experimental ... I tell a story and I want to share it with my readers." As a result, with her Ireland-set stories featuring strong heroines, friendship and romance, Binchy has gained quite a following since she became a bestselling author at age 43.

It was a summer of warmth.... Kate Ryan and her  husband, John, have a rollicking pub in the Irish  village of Mountfern... lovely twelve-year-old  twins... and such wonderful dreams.... It was a summer  of innocence... but all that is about to change  this fateful summer of 1962 when American  millionaire Patrick O'Neill comes to town with his  irresistible charm and a pocketful of money... when love  and hate vie for a town's quiet heart and old  traditions begin to crumble away.... It was a summer of  love that would never come again.... A time that  has been captured forever in Maeve Binchy's  compelling family drama... a novel you will never forget.

Publishers Weekly

Binchy's latest novel (after Light a Penny Candle) is set in the tiny Irish backwater of Mountfern, home to a handful of families and typical of hundreds of similar hamlets in the British Isles where life is lived to the rhythm of the seasons. Mountfern is the ancestral home of Patrick O'Neill, a rough, rich American whose wealth comes from bars and restaurants, and whose dream is to build a grand hotel in Mountfern. The consequences of Patrick's arrival there early in the '60s are often hilarious: the local aristocracyespecially the widows and spinstersvies for his attentions, while the villagers are beguiled by his largesse and by thoughts of the prosperity the hotel will bring. But tragedy strikes when a bulldozer working on the hotel site crushes Kate Ryan's spine; her adaptation to life in a wheelchair is brave and touching. Kate (Binchy's most splendid character) and her husband own a pub that is bound to suffer when the hotel opens. Other charactersall memorably portrayedcome to be resentful of the "Yank's'' money while they reveal their own cupidity. Patrick's joy at his homecoming is slowly eroded, and his teenage son Kerry breaks hearts, including his father's. Binchy's lyrical prose has a lilt and musicality that makes it a joy to read. With a strong narrative drive that never flags, the story engages all the reader's emotions. (September)