In 1980s Ireland, Róisín and Red bond as only two precocious and disaffected teenagers can. Soon Red is privy to the secret source of Róisín’s shame and anger: the father who has abandoned her and her mother to their damp house and never-ending strife. But what does Róisín know about why Red avoids going home to his own posh parents and house --- the house he soon flees forever? When a Christmas visit to her father reveals the devastating truth of his new life in London, Róisín tracks down Red and moves into his Pimlico squat. But the path he is now on is a disturbing one, and gradually they drift apart. And yet the great, never-consummated passion of her youth remains a visitation upon the years that follow.

In THE END OF THE WORLD IS A CUL DE SAC, women’s lives are etched by poverty --- material, emotional, sexual --- but also splashed by beauty, sometimes even joy, as they search for the good in the cards they’ve been dealt. A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a derelict housing estate, with blood on her hands. An expectant mother’s worst fears about her husband’s entanglement with a teenage girl are confirmed. A sister is tormented by visions of the man her brother murdered during the Troubles. A woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage.

Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast, teaching at a parochial school and moonlighting at her family’s pub. There she meets Michael Agnew, a Protestant barrister who has made a name for himself defending IRA members. Against her better judgment, Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect.