The Mending Room

Synopsis

Dublin, January 1943. Annie moves through her days with quiet purpose: tending the fires, cycling to her allotment, reading letters at the writing desk where she keeps a bundle tied with ribbon. The city is under the shadow of the Emergency — rationing, blackouts, the memory of bombs falling not a mile up the road — but in Annie’s house the greatest weight is private. Her son Alec left for Burma six years ago to work on a tea plantation, and the world he travelled to has since been consumed by war.

As Annie waits for news, the novel opens outward through a sequence of letters: from Alec, writing home from a paddle steamer on the Irrawaddy, from the orchid-rich forests of the Shan States, and finally from the chaos of a country under invasion; and from his cousin Rose, a painter and naturalist, whose own letters reveal the full story of the journey — its wonders and dangers, its difficult loyalties, and what it cost to find a way home.

Moving between the intimacy of one woman’s household and the sweep of two continents, The Mending Room is a novel about what endures: long marriages, old friendships, the habits of care that outlast happiness. Written with the precision of a poet and the emotional intelligence of a master storyteller, it announces Amanda Bell as a major new voice in Irish fiction.