This tightly controlled novel meditates on the nature of memory through three generations of an Irish family. In 2006, a businessman, unaware of the financial troubles that will soon engulf his country, has become obsessed with old photographs. As he researches the development of color processing, his sister and aunt quietly grapple with recent trauma and his three children inch toward adulthood. Madden’s language and her careful pacing imbue scenes of routine with a sense of poetry. When the narrator breaks in at the end, it’s clear that, like the pictures that the protagonist studies, the story is a moment of suspended animation: the characters are helplessly unable to parse their history or anticipate the future.
