Limestone

Clare Lacey teaches art history at the University of Canterbury; she is in her late forties, newly single and has no children. She travels to Cork for a conference whose theme is Location/Dis-location, but what she really wants is to track down her father, Michael Lacey, a charming Irish rogue who went out from the family home in Oamaru for cigarettes more than forty years ago and never returned. Odd encounters spur her on: a woman high up in a tower, a sightless man where two roads meet, a singer whose language she cannot follow. Her search moves between her mother's Oamaru sitting room, conference hotels, Europe's painted caves and a New Zealand summer, and the book weighs inheritance, faith, art and love against the slow time of the limestone country where she grew up.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

Ireland, New Zealand

First published

2009

Author's age

62 when first published

ISBN

9781869791681 (Vintage, New Zealand)