The Gathering

The title refers to the funeral of Liam Hegarty, an alcoholic who killed himself in the sea at Brighton. His mother and eight of his nine surviving siblings gather in Dublin for the wake. The narrator is 39-year-old Veronica, the sibling who was closest to him.

She looks back through her family’s troubled history to make sense of his death, believing that his drinking began with something that happened in childhood at their grandmother’s house. The novel takes place in Ireland and England.