First published in 1985, this unusual debut novella is a sensitive return to the impressions and sensations of early childhood. There are obvious echoes of the opening sequences of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Healy's narrator is a young orphan preparing to leave a convent-run orphanage for a new life. One of the strengths of the book is the evocation of a child's uncertainty as to the feelings of others towards him. Sister, the nun at the orphanage is both a figure of fear and of familiar rough comfort. Intense and precise, the book recreates an Ireland of another time, but Healy's major achievement is the way in which he sustains this subtle, rather elusive, impressionistic story as it alternates between urgency and thoughtfulness, between the exact and the random.
