The son of dysfunctional and destitute parents secures employment as a member of the morning breakfast staff in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel. The job affords the boy a respite from his father's profound apathy and his mother's obsession with religion. His father Paddy, an ex-British army soldier, considers his marriage to Molly to be a greater threat to his existence than his life and death struggles in the trenches during the Great War. Molly considers her life with the unemployed Paddy and ten children a crucifixion that will ensure her a place in Heaven among her favourite martyrs. In the...

Young Gabriel Walsh has been uprooted from his poverty-stricken life in Dublin and transplanted to a castle in Tarrytown, New York State. This reversal of fortune has come about through Margaret Burke Sheridan, a retired opera diva who in her prime sang at La Scala and was Puccini's favourite Madame Butterfly. Having met the boy at Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel where he worked as a waiter, Maggie persuaded her wealthy American patrons, Ruth and Emerson Axe, to become his guardians and take him to America. In Tarrytown Castle Gabriel finds himself living in a kind of limbo, situated as he is...