Have you never forgotten someone you’ve slept with?
Neil Jordan is best known as an internationally famous film director, of course – The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, Interview With The Vampire and many others. But he is also an accomplished novelist.
The Well Of St Nobody is a story of legend, of music and eroticism, of consequences and of identity.
“The girl who had walked her mother through those dry stone walls decorated with crutches was not the girl who had lost her virginity on the living-room floor of Tonglee Road; was not the girl who rattled out her Bach fugues in front of the Rachmaninov virtuoso…” The virtuoso is William Barrow, and for him the encounter has little significance. He doesn’t even recognise her when they meet again. But years later Tara is a piano teacher scratching a living in a little village in west Ireland, and the famous pianist turns up in her village and doesn’t know her. But she knows him. She takes up a position as housekeeper for him and begins to invent a legend around the well in his garden, and bit by bit the gears of story begin to grind and the past comes crashing into the present.
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