A heartbreaking love story, set against the dramatic backdrop of Obama's election and the global financial crisis.

This is a story of nationality and identity, of the power of optimism to defeat despair and the unstoppable march of time.

It’s the story of two people who find joy together when they were least expecting it. It’s about family and dogs and swimming in the sea.

It’s about the past and the future and the elusive skill of living in the moment.

"A unique romance that can't fail to enchant you..." Heat Magazine.

MacMahon's narrative is about unexpected love, but mainly it's about transformation, from success to its opposite, from being alone to being part of a family—however dysfunctional—and about “a time filled with the magic of possibility, a time equally fraught with danger....Perhaps only the churlish among us could find fault in a love story that unfolds to a Bruce Springsteen soundtrack on the shores of Dublin Bay. ”

Nancy Wigston, Toronto Star.

MacMahon's journalist eye enhances the political and historical backdrop of her novel. Readers mourning the loss of Irish author Maeve Binchy may find a new friend in MacMahon, who delivers a similar sort of family drama well suited to drowsy afternoons and a cup of tea with a packet of tissues nearby."

Carol Memmott, USA Today.

A "very satisfying story of people who are easy to believe in and hard to forget." Maeve Binchy, The Irish Times.

"MacMahon is an extraordinarily self-disciplined writer. Her dialogue couldn't appear more naturalistic. Her prose couldn't be tighter; yet it could not appear more effortless or beautiful in passages like this, "Strange, the way you manage to block things out. The way you convince yourself about something one way or the other, the way you manage to convince yourself so convincingly. Until the moment you realise you were never convinced at all".

MacMahon writes movingly about the balm of hope and the redemption of love, about the very real pain of loss and the restorative power of family and, not half as oddly as it might sound, the power and insight of Bruce Springsteen.

Lorraine Courtney, Sunday Independent.

"A book that takes your breath away." Woman's Way.

"This richly poetic first novel combines a strong contemporary feel with a sense of timelessness. The action is set in Dublin against the gathering clouds of financial recession and optimism of Obama’s 2008 election victory. The issues the book raises are the eternal ones of loss, deceit and inadequacy. MacMahon’s prose fizzes from page one, capturing the imagination and holding the reader."

Vanessa Berridge/The Express

"This is a beautiful, humorous, gentle love story that's on a nose-bleedingly higher level than your average romance. Reading this means being slowly lulled and then swept away to book heaven where the greatest sadness will be finishing it and having to leave everyone in it behind. I know – I'm underselling this aren't I?"

Ani Johnson, The Book Bag.

"MacMahon's great strengths are often in what she doesn't do. She doesn't cripple her cleanly styled writing by saddling it with unwieldy metaphors. She doesn't push her characters through endless plot hoops in a dizzying, unrealistic fashion. And she doesn't pretend that life for her characters is hunky-dory."

Nadine O'Regan, The Sunday Business Post.