Holy Mother who knows so much. Help me for I'm destroyed in the heart. Tell me is it love to be like this.

That measures me on my days like the shadow on the mountain.'On a remote island off the West coast of Ireland in the 1970s, young farmer Micael catches sight of a girl on a beach with long hair so blonde it could be white. Befriending the girl and her travelling companions, a world of possibility opens up to Micael - but where there's opportunity, there is also peril ... Juanita Casey's astounding first novel is a cult classic ready to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers.

Drawing on her own life and speaking for her marginalised com- munity, Casey offers a feminist and class-conscious story that explores the eternal choices of youth, between the comfort of a stifling domesticity and the promise and risk of the un- known, characterised in the incomparable wildness of the West of Ireland. The bestselling Casey takes her place alongside such writers as JM Synge and Kevin Barry - the missing connection between the two.