Murphy, Rebecca
Blood and Water
€16.99
A debut novel about a marriage broken by grief, a West Cork island, and the family secrets waiting at the end of the road. For readers of Anne Enright and Maggie O’Farrell.
Description
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Mercier Press · May 2026
Blood
&
Water
Susan and Jen had built everything together — the house, the marriage, the future they were certain was coming. Then grief moved in, and neither of them knew how to ask the other for help.
When a marriage
goes quiet
They had been through the kind of loss that doesn't have a clean ending — the kind you carry in your body, that sits with you on the couch in silence, that makes you lie awake in the dark with nothing left to say and no way to begin.
Susan didn't leave because she stopped loving Jen. She left because 'like attending a play, she was in the audience of her life' — watching herself be someone she no longer recognised, in a house that held the shape of every hope that hadn't come true. The silence between them deepened. The next day, Susan fled.
'Jen would know. She shoved the name out of her head and returned to the skyline.'— Blood & Water
The island
A small island off the Wild Atlantic Way — the last place Susan thought she'd end up
Dune Island runs on salt air, gossip, and Peggy's stout. A community small enough that the past has nowhere to hide — and just remote enough that the rest of the world stops feeling real. The ferry only runs when Mick decides the weather will hold.
The inheritance
A cottage, a distillery, a dog called Walter — and a man nobody talked about
Susan arrives to claim what her uncle Frank left her. She expected paperwork. What she finds instead is evidence of a whole life — full of love, full of loss — that Frank carried in silence for fifty years. The longer she stays, the more she understands that silence runs in her family. And what it costs.
The complication
She came to the island to be alone. The island had other ideas.
Susan didn't plan for the island to offer her anything other than quiet. But Dune Island has its own momentum — its own people, its own pull. When something unexpected finds her on the sand one night under a full moon, she has to ask herself a question she hasn't been ready to face.
Is she here to grieve her marriage — or to escape it?
'A sorrow she couldn't quite name lurked in him. Her own grief recognised it.'— Blood & Water
Coming May 2026
Some losses can't be grieved in the life that caused them.
Blood & Water · Rebecca Murphy
Mercier Press · mercierpress.ie
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Publisher/Manufacturer:
Mercier Press
82c Ballyhooly Road, St Luke's, Corkinfo@mercierpress.ie