The Fisher Child

Like the Renaissance painting which fascinates Kate, The Fisher Child is in three parts. In the first, Kate is happily married to Dan, both of them second-generation Irish and comfortable in their middle-class north London lives. They have two children, a boy and a girl, with another one on the way. But when Meg is born, Dan cannot accept her as his child, and retreats to Ireland in bewilderment. In Wexford, his family are partaking in the the bi-centenary commemoration of the 1798 Rebellion, and he learns about his ancest0r Hugh Byrne, a rebel who was forced to flee Ireland, presumably to America. Dan will never know what the reader discovers in part two – that Hugh had not settled in America but in the Caribbean island of Montserrat, where he fell in love with Ama, a black slave whose genes have lain hidden in Dan’s family for two centuries.



Dan is never granted as much historical knowledge as the reader, but even without all the facts he learns he can have a little more trust, in his wife, but also an implicit trust; one shared by the other characters in this wise, tender novel, in the muddled connections and continuities of their lives. –Paul Magrs, TLS
From its mesmerising opening chapters in Florence, through the shocking climax to the close, the complicated inter-family relationships threaded with echoes of the past are woven with exquisite skill. A beautiful, evocative tale of love tested. –Sue Leonard, The Irish Examiner
The novel’s final image is startling, enigmatic, beautiful and challenging. Through it, Casey appears to urge a re-examination of that which we assume to be philosophically ordered, and to confront our own dreams just as Dan does: which implies that nothing is separate and that the world has a wild interdependance that rises even from the genetic, cellular mine of our own bodies. A fresh and intriguing book that many writers would love to have written. – Mary O'Donnell, Amazon
In its own quiet way this novel is unsettling and even shocking as it challenges the reader to step into Dan’s shoes: are you as open-minded, as trusting, as loyal as you think you are? –Kirkus UK
Casey, one of the quiet men of Irish writing, is a careful, diligent storyteller, and, as he has shown here, daring. [his]... attempts to describe the emergence of modern Irish society, its myths, its realities and bitter truths, through his Bann River Trilogy, remains brave and honest. –Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times