I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this book! It's the best thing I've read in a long time, and is one of those books that is equally at home in adult hands as in children's. Mary is 12. She lives in Dublin in the midst of a loving family, but her grandmother, Emer, is in hospital, dying, and she and everyone else knows it. Mary, her mother, Scarlett, and Emer are very close, and when Mary meets a strange woman one day, there is something vaguely familiar about her. Not only that, there is something distinctly odd too: she shimmers and seems to go in and out of focus. When Mary tells her mum that she has met this woman called Tansy, mum is shocked. Her grandmother was called Tansy. When Mary and Scarlett both meet Tansy, they are hardly surprised to discover she is a ghost, and is, in fact, Emer's mother. She died when Emer was only 3, and she has 'hung around' to make sure Emer is all right. In a series of flashbacks from 1928 to the present, told by Scarlett, Emer and Tansy, we learn about life on the farm near Enniscorthy, and Mary comes to a fuller realisation about her family, its tragedies and its joys. The book is full of humour and fun, and witty dialogue which makes the sad theme more poignant in a way, and deeply moving. In a wonderful denouement, the four women drive south in Scarlett's car to see the old farmhouse and some of the places important to them, and Emer is made to realise that death with her mother by her side is not so bad after all. A brilliant, funny, sophisticated, inspiring book.