This Cold Country
Scenes from an Anglo-Irish childhood.

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Praise For This Cold Country

Annabel Davis-Goff's latest novel easily draws on a range of comic traditions: from the broad satire of Cold Comfort Farm and Experiences of an Irish R.M. to the mordant wit of the later novels of Molly Keane, not to mention a detour into Dickens when Daisy is "pondering her financial affairs." Yet This Cold Country is more than an exercise in comic nostalgia...

Admirers of Davis-Goff's previous novel, The Dower House (a portrayal of the Anglo-Irish in the physically safer but financially no less perilous 1950s), and her memoir of her own Anglo-Irish childhood, Walled Gardens (a source of ticklish hints abut the inspiration for some of her characters), will know to expect the sort of storytelling in which, as the T.S. Eliot quotation that leads off her memoir goes, "more is heard than is spoken" - storytelling, that is, in which social suicide can be committed through the smallest gesture and the contents of a room can be as revelatory as the actions of the people who have assembled (or, more likely, inherited) them.

- New York Times Book Review

No one I know of who is writing today gets what the Anglo-Irish are all about better than does Annabel Davis-Goff. Her latest book, This Cold Country, drives that conviction home...

It is a tour de force of narrative detachment and involvement, a deft, subtle, caring and honest novel that pursues and present a vision of truths within a tiny tribal culture. It is human and artistically accomplished.

Davis-Goff has a remarkable capacity to relate, and bring alive, the routines of simple domesticity. She deftly weaves into the action little lessons in history - often the same events seen through the contrasting prisms of Roman Catholic, Gaelic Irish perceptions and those of the Protestant Anglo-Irish…This makes the novel a valuable text on the utter obsession with history that permeates life on that island even today.

- Michael Packenham, Baltimore Sun

This book is full of rich language, broad strokes of romance, and the historical nuances of a traditionally quixotic and troubled country.

- Select Fiction

Paperback from Harvest, June 2003.