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The Stone House
The Stone House
Nov 17, 2025 8:07 AM

Author:Marita Conlon-McKenna

The Stone House

Everything changes for Kate, Moya and Romy when they receive word that Maeve Dillon, their mother, is critically ill. It is time to return from Dublin, London and New York to Rossmore and the old stone house overlooking the Irish Sea where they grew up. But ancient jealousies surface as each sister confronts the past and the decisions they have made.

For work-driven Kate it is time to take stock of her role as a high-flying ambitious lawyer and single parent; life is a battle between work and looking after Molly with little time for a proper relationship. Even Patrick, the man she once fell for, has ended up marrying her sister. Beautiful and intense Moya must take a hard look at her marriage to the charming but unfaithful Patrick and consider her own worth. For wild child Romy who has travelled the world and hasn't put a foot on Irish soil for years, it is time to finally stop running and find the courage to confront her family.

A good and caring mother, Maeve Dillon has somehow over the years labelled each of her three daughters: Moya the beautiful, Kate the brains, and Romy, the bold and wild one. Now it is finally time for all three to break out of the box.

Reviews

Terrific...original, cleverly told and the pace of the writing carries the reader onwards effortlessly

—— BOOKS IRELAND

Smart, witty, honest, and never anything less than utterly engaging

—— Jonathan Tropper, author of 'How to Talk to a Widower'

Engrossing . . . Haimoff's writing resonates with an authenticity and gravitas that books about girls trying to find themselves in the big city often lack. Her details about elite schools and childhood haunts in Manhattan pepper Hailey's memories in often touching ways. A thoughtful novel for our time

—— Publishers Weekly

Swift’s first novel, with its brilliant near-future vision of an ecologically and socially devastated world and characters who resonate with life and passion, marks her as an author to watch.

—— Jackie Cassada , Library Journal

A glittering first novel: a kind of flooded Gormenghast treated with the alienated polish of DeLillo's Cosmopolis. The result is a gripping novel, readable, beautiful, politically engaged and wholly accomplished. Swift is a ridiculously talented writer.

—— Adam Roberts

[Pynchon’s] eighth novel is something of a return to form, and could well be his best since his comeback… Offers a winning heroine, scintillating screwball dialogue and a typical host of weird, zany or depraved characters, this time corralled into a tighter-than-usual plot.

—— John Dugdale , Sunday Times

Entropic in its plottery and joyously paranoid in its world view… My advice: read it, but don’t try to follow it. It’ll make you giddy.

—— John Sutherland , The Times

There’s plenty of space within the pattern for Pynchon’s trademark digressions…songs, terrible puns…and some magnificent set pieces.

—— Thomas Jones , Financial Times

Though Bleeding Edge doesn’t stint on leftish theorizing about far-right misdeeds, it also gives the sense that for the first time Pynchon is looking at things from a very great height, as a battle between toy soldiers.

—— Leo Robson , New Statesman

The new novel by the reclusive Pynchon is set in New York in 2001 and follows a fraud investigator who takes on more than she bargains for when she checks out a billionaire internet tycoon.

—— Mail on Sunday

[Pynchon’s] working towards a sort of metaphysics of our accelerated, encrypted world; he’s positing that once you reach a certain bandwidth, classical notions of space and time, and even maybe the unitary indivisible soul, break down.

—— Keith Miller , Literary Review

Routinely extraordinary but also wonderfully funny, regularly gripping and, whisper it, engaging…

—— Hugh MacDonald , Herald

Beneath the constant wordplay and manic invention there’s serious intent; the intensity of Pynchon’s prose can be a demanding slog but stay the course and you’ll be rewarded for your efforts.

—— Ben Felsenburg , Metro

Pynchon has a particular gift for apprehending a scene, for conveying the resonance of objects and understanding their role in our lives.

—— Jennifer Szalai , Prospect

The narrative voice of Bleeding Edge is warmer: it’s omniscient and at times essayistic but more often casual, chatty and in the present tense. Pynchon has an almost fatherly fondness for his characters… He takes an obvious pleasure in the game: in his gags and obscurities, in storytelling, and in chronicling the wasted days and nights of a scene that flickered for a few years and then burned out.

—— Christian Lorentzen , London Review of Books

Bleeding Edge is an elegiac yet compulsively readable novel. The humour crackles, eliciting chuckles on almost every page. No one works magic with words like Pynchon, and here he is at the height of his powers, by turns gripping, thought-provoking, inventive, touching and poetic, not to mention warmly human.

—— Sean Carroll , Nature

Pynchon makes interesting observations about life, there are lovely twists of lyricism throughout, the dialogue is punchy and believable, the jokes are funny.

—— Darragh McManus , Irish Independent

Maxine is a fraud investigator and mother of two in pre-9/11 Manhattan, but a peek into the books of a tech billionaire uncovers – this is a Pynchon novel after all – a vast conspiracy.

—— Time

But the big surprise of Bleeding Edge is how tender it is. The novel makes an appeal for the survival of innocence in a hostile world. Pynchon wants to find a way out of paranoia and conspiracy, even as he forces the reader deeper into them… The novel really feels like the work of a writer coming to terms with the world. And while he may not like much of what he finds out there, he wants there to be a place for innocence somewhere. As everything falls apart, there's a real yearning in Bleeding Edge for at least some things to hang together.

—— David Barrett , Standpoint

Enormous fun… Deserves a place alongside Pynchon’s finest works.

—— James Kidd , Independent on Sunday

Pynchon’s latest novel is a historical romance set in during the internet’s infancy in the spring of 2001.

—— Jo Ellison and Violet Henderson , Vogue

Bleeding Edge is a romp. On full display are Pynchon’s trademark linguistic and imaginative acrobatics… It may sound frivolous but an emotional maturity counterpoints the silly songs, deliberately bad puns, and pop-cultural references

—— Irish Examiner

When he’s in his hardboiled vein, [Pynchon] writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year.

—— Tom Stoppard , Guardian

Pynchon's best novel since Mason & Dixon, an exhilarating shaggy-dog private-detective story that punctured its own garrulous charm with sharp stabs of betrayal and threat. Astonishing, too, that that a 76-year-old should produce a novel with such wild and slangy bounce.

—— Tim Martin , Telegraph

Pynchon at his most hilarious, it gave way to more sombre realities involving a suspicious Silicon Alley tech company and its possible links to international terrorism and who knows what else.

—— Uncut

Suspenseful and darkly humorous.

—— Michael Dirda , Times Literary Supplement

Intriguing, and probably the most straightforwardly readable of his books.

—— Gordon Brewer , Herald

A thrilling ride through the first tech bubble, filled with "bleeding edge" technology... Accomplished, funny and digressive.

—— Financial Times

Pynchon's take on the attack on the Twin Towers. Will he reject the conspiracy theories of the "truthers" or spin some new conspiracies of his own? I think the answer is both. But I wouldn't swear to it.

—— Gordon Brewer , Scotsman

· Pynchon delivered a piece of typically raggedy brilliance with Bleeding Edge.

—— Stuart Kelly , Scotsman

Engrossing, hilarious and shocking.

—— Jonathan Jones , Guardian

Pynchon’s high-energy writing crackles with dark wit and foreboding

—— Mail on Sunday

Playful and paranoid New York noir

—— Adam Boulton , New Statesman

Readers will have to decide for themselves how they feel about an open-ended mystery, but for those who don’t care so much about the destination, the journey is more than worth it

—— Stephen Joyce , Nudge
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