Not yet the true cold of winter though the trees huddle like old men stripped for punishment and the land is haggard just waiting. What comes to meet them is a smacking cold as if it has lurked there just for them, an animal thing eager in the dawn, a morning that sits low and crude and gray. She rolls from her heels to her toes as she is dragged out the door. Will against will she pits, though Sarah’s will now has become more like animal power, a secret strength, she thinks, like Nealy Ford’s ox before he killed it and left, and now her wrist burns in her mother’s grip. She swings her free fist, misses, swings at the dark, at the air complicit, digs her heels into the floor. Her eyes fight the gloom to get a fasten on her mother, see just a hand pale as bone vised upon her wrist. She is drawn to the exit as if harnessed to her mother, her body bent like a buckling field implement, her feet blunt blades. From a place that is speechless comes the recognition that something in the making up of her world has been unfixed. It cracks aloud in protest, sounds as if her arm were rotten, a branch from a tree snapped clean. She cannot sound-out anyhow, her mouth is thick and tonguing shock, so it is her shoulder that speaks. She thinks, do not shout and stir the others, do not let them see Mam like this. She finds herself arm-hauled across the room, panic shot loose to the blood. And in the early light her mother goes for her, rips her from sleep, takes her from a dream of the world. He is the author of Red Sky in Morning, The Black Snow, and Grace. Paul Lynch was the chief film critic of Ireland's Sunday Tribune newspaper from 2007-2011. Set in the potato famine of 1845, it follows 14-year-old Grace, whose mother sends her out into the world disguised as a boy. The following is from Paul Lynch’s novel, Grace.

Grace a novel paul lynch