Words are capable of flying. They dart through windows, over fences, between bar stools and across courtyards. They travel rapidly from mouth to ear, from ear to mouth. And as they go, they pick up speed and weight and substance and gravity. Until they land with a scud, take seed and grow as fast as the unruliest of beanstalks.
The dead are almost as alive as the living, and they help a young man learn who killed his mother, an unwed teenager in a small Irish town which called her a whore, and wanted to believe that she'd simply got on a bus and left their community one day in 1950.