With their two young sons, Helen and Hugh reside in Dublin in a comfortable, middle-class house. Her career serving as Ireland’s youngest school headmistress is impressive, and her husband, Hugh, is easy-going and affectionate. Thirty-something Helen is, by all appearances, successful. During this short reunion, longstanding grievances come to light that afford Helen newfound understandings of love and family. At his request, Helen joins Declan and their estranged mother, Lily, at their grandmother’s home for five days. Helen O’Doherty’s younger brother, twenty-eight-year-old Declan, is dying. Now one of them – the Blackwater Lightship – is gone, and its absence resonates with the loss that haunts the family at the center of the story. Two lighthouses once stood within view of the house. Colm Tóibín’s 1999 novel, The Blackwater Lightship, is set in 1990s Ireland and takes place, predominantly, in an old house perched on a crumbling, seaside cliff in County Wexford.
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