In the StoryEvery Seamus
At Seamus’s funeral, two hundred strangers arrive with grief of their own. Nora Kelleher thought she knew the loved ones of the plumber she has just lost. Yet the Dublin service fills with people mourning a brother, a father, a lover. Each tells of a different Seamus. None seems simply to have come to the wrong funeral.
Open the novel ↗A moment in the opening pages
Nora had spent twenty-eight years teasing Seamus about that door. Whenever a wardrobe stuck in the frame, he swore he would widen it “as soon as he had a quiet morning.” She had eventually filed the promise alongside the squeaking bathroom faucet, the third garage shelf, and the garden wall that leaned without ever falling. Now two men in dark suits had removed the window sash, a neighbor held the curtain at arm’s length, and Seamus was coming home at…Read the excerpt ↗