Dunne Family Books in Order

The Dunne Family sequence traces one Irish family across some of the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century, from the last days of British rule to the long aftershocks of independence. Each book stands alone, but together they show how public history seeps into private lives, and how the same events echo through several generations.

The story begins in the play The Steward of Christendom, set in a county home in Baltinglass around 1932. Thomas Dunne, once chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, is now elderly, confused and confined. As he drifts between the present and the past, he relives his years overseeing Dublin Castle for the British administration, the handover of power to the new Free State, and the breakdown of his own household. The play is part memory piece and part reckoning, as his daughters try to care for him while carrying their own scars.

In the novel Annie Dunne, the focus shifts to one of those daughters many years later. Now in her late fifties, lame and unmarried, Annie is living with her cousin Sarah on a small farm in rural Wicklow in the late 1950s. When two young relatives are sent to them for the summer, the quiet routines of the farm open into a brief season of happiness and fear. Annie finds herself acting as a kind of mother for the first time, even as courtship, money worries and modernity threaten to uproot her yet again.

A Long Long Way moves back to the First World War and follows Willie Dunne, Thomas's son and Annie's brother, who enlists in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers because he is too short to follow his father into the police. On the Western Front he learns about mud, gas and terror, but also about divided loyalties, as news of the Easter Rising reaches the trenches and Irish soldiers are caught between king, country and home.

On Canaan's Side gives a last, wide perspective through Lilly Bere, another of Thomas's children. Writing in her late eighties from a house near the American coast, she looks back over a life that began in post independence Dublin, took her across the Atlantic after a killing, and led through work, marriage and multiple bereavements in the United States. Her memories tie together the Dunne stories and show how the politics of Ireland follow her even in exile.

Readers coming to the Dunne Family series can expect lyrical, strongly voiced narration, an interest in people pushed to the edges of official history and an ongoing conversation with other Barry books. Characters and surnames cross over with the McNulty novels and even with the American sequence beginning in Days Without End, so that the Dunnes sit at the heart of a larger family tapestry.