Cloud chamber

Moving from late-nineteenth-century Ireland to contemporary America, Dorris tells the extraordinary story of Rose Mannion and her descendants. Rose is, as she herself immodestly notes, "a force to behold," with a full head of the blackest hair - a legacy of a shipwrecked Spanish ancestor washed up on a Connemaran shore generations earlier - and an unstoppable will. Even her relocation to a small river town in western Kentucky cannot temper the fire of her nature. Over a period of more than one hundred years, Rose's legacy of love and betrayal, coupled with the intense internal struggles of…