Dolly Considine's Hotel

Julian Ryder (aka Paddy Butler) is an eighteen-year-old aspiring writer fleeing a life unlived. Dolly McClean (nee Considine) is knee-deep in running a hotel populated by family secrets and Irish republicans. They seem to have little in common - until Julian rescues Dolly's barmaid-cum-cleaner from a supposed IRA thug. It doesn't take long for him to embroil himself in the gossip of the bar and the guests' bedsheets. Dolly and her entourage quickly become fodder for his literary ambitions and soon it becomes impossible to extricate reality from fantasy...Moving fluidly between the 1950s of Dolly's youth and Julian's 1980s summer of unrequited love, Irish recession and emigration, the hotel becomes a stage for farce and tragedy. As statues give birth to fully grown men while sword-wielding Irish dancers perform for party politicians, Julian's fictions, Dolly's secrets and political intrigue threaten to tear them and Ireland itself apart in the run up to the Pro-life Constitutional Amendment of September 1983.