“On a chilly morning in 1954, in her home in south Dublin, Eva Fitzgerald remembers her wedding day 28 years previously  – and a vow extracted by her mother: “No matter what hand life deals you, promise me that you will strive tooth and nail for the right to be happy.”

‘Already, in these early pages of An Ark of Light, Dermot Bolger’s expansive and empathetic new novel, we deduce that Eva’s mother was canny, clear-sighted, and perfectly able to foretell the trajectory of her daughter’s future. The dimensions of an ill-starred coupling will soon show themselves; and Eva’s marriage, to a red-faced, whiskey-loving scion of a declining Co Mayo ascendancy family, has been as ill-starred as they come.

‘Now in this house in Rathgar, we glimpse the wedding day of Eva’s daughter Hazel – and the vow is renewed. It is Eva’s credo, her everything. It is a promise to be grasped with both hands.

‘An Ark of Light has already offered us a portrait of that Mayo marital home. The story of the declining Big House is familiar to an Irish reader: the family home is cold and damp, weeds grow in the avenue, the surrounding lands have been sold off in a (failed, naturally) bid to keep the show on the road; and the Catholic neighbours are eager to see the back of a family that has long outlived its usefulness in the district. We are reminded too that this is a country in which divorce is unobtainable, and in which a woman requires her husband’s permission to open a bank account or hold a passport: cold but necessary notes on an all too recent past, and useful context against which to set Eva’s determination to slough off a life that supplies nothing in the happiness line. And so she must be off: “If she delayed her departure any longer she would grow too cowed to ever take flight.” Against this unprepossessingly chill, dank background, a new life began.