Rating: 
Summary: Big-Hearted Book
Review: Nuala O' Faolain has done something remarkably unusual here. She has written of middle-aged female fears and insecurities--with gusto. Note the photo on the cover, the discomfort of the woman, head angled awkwardly on her hand. In a way, that photo leads right into the main character with her awkwardness and fears, with her continual struggle not to succumb to lonliness. Something is very touching when a woman lets all that we don't say about our advancing years out onto the page. And this too: she, the author/character is generous, generous with her words, her story within a story, her characters, Jimmy especially, herself, whether with others or when alone. Though the book is unweildy in parts, that's fine because it's all of a piece with the subject. I salute her big-hearted work and her larger than life tale, which is not polished and all for the better!
Rating: 
Summary: Spellbinding, enchanting, overpowering
Review: Kathleen De Burca is a thoroughly modern woman living in London. She is nearing 50, but she is still quite attractive, takes care of her body and wears designer clothes. She has roamed the world as a travel writer, eaten in the best restaurants, stayed at elite hotels, and had numerous lovers. To Kathleen, life is about the pursuit of passion and passion equals love. Kathleen will do almost anything in that pursuit, a sort of means justify the ends, even if it hurts other people and herself. Yet real love has still eluded her. She is not sure whether it is the last travel assignment in Manila where she sees children with a baby in the road that puts her off travel writing, but for sure, the sudden death of her best friend and colleague, Jimmy, signals a wake-up call.Finally feeling that she has finally hit rock bottom, Kathleen decides to give up travel writing and go back to her native Ireland, which she ran from twenty years before and never looked back. The purpose is not to stay or reunite with her family she tells herself, but to research a real nineteenth century Irish scandal, that had come to her attention years before - a love affair between a member of the gentry (the Talbots) and her Irish groom, that resulted in a tragic divorce and the loss of her child. There are a lot of unanswered questions in Kathleen's mind about the case. Kathleen travels to Ballygall, in remote Western Ireland, the lands of the former Talbots. She begins her research but becomes more and more intrigued by the history of the potato famine of 1848 and wonders at the connection to the 1849 scandal. As if this were not enough, fate draws Kathleen into an unexpected affair, but this time it is real love and she is going to have to make difficult choices. That and her being back on Irish soil and researching the scandal, force her to look back on her life and face painful truths. This is a large menu and in much less skillful hands it may have failed, but in the hands of Nuala O'Faolain, it is a triumph. As Kathleen asks the tough questions, we the readers are always one step ahead or one step right after her anticipating and asking also. This is too good a story to spoil, so I won't tell you the outcome, but as the two stories intertwine, Marianne Talbot's and Kathleen's, we find out that life is much more complicated than it seems and that there are no easy answers. The story is spellbinding and heroic, gorgeously written, full of constant surprises. If you have one novel to read this year, make it this one!
Rating:
Summary: Hard to forget
Review: A phrase you see on a lot of back-cover-blurbs is that a book is like "Possession." I've always wondered what that meant -that the novel delivers the same kind of engrossing, teasing literary thrill that A.S. Byatt's novel did, or does it mix a modern tale with one placed in the past? Usually it's the latter, with the touted book offering a disappointing shadow of the satisfaction given by Byatt's book. Nuala O'Faolain charged on the literary scene several years ago with "Are You Somebody?" which intrigued a lot of readers. Her first novel, "My Dream of You" meets everyone's expectations. It is like "Possession" in that it is completely engrossing, teasing, thrilling, moving, and yes, it does include a story rooted in the past. But then, for the Irish, so much is rooted in the past. Kathleen de Burca is a travel writer whose carefully chaotic life is thrown in to real disorder by the loss of her dearest friend and retirement. She goes back to Ireland to research a novel on a story that's always intrigued her about an English lady's alleged affair with her Irish stableman during the Famine. Her return to the country of her birth brings her back to the land of her wretched childhood, but also throws her into a love affair which turns her upside down. The characters are so well drawn that it's hard to believe they're not really in the library or behind the bar or in the shop where Kathleen meets them. Ireland, with its rich, conflictive history and wonderful contrary people comes across in all its complexities. Kathleen's physical and spiritual journey is completely involving, and this book lingers long after you've turned the last page. .
Rating:
Summary: A DEFT MEMOIRIST NOW A BRILLIANT STORYTELLER
Review: Part shocking history, part sexual odyssey, all lyrical prose, Dublin journalist Nuala O'Faolain's first fiction is stunning as she interweaves past and present in parallel stories of two women seeking fulfillment. Ms. O'Faolain's bestselling memoir, "Are You Somebody?," won accolades for its utter honesty and brilliant craftsmanship. These attributes shine as brightly in "My Dream Of You." Kathleen de Burca, an unmarried 50+ travel writer is a woman who "believed in passion the way other people believed in God; everything fell into place around it." Yet to date her life has been a series of meaningless, rueful-in-the-morning liaisons. Compounding her unhappiness is the sudden death of her best friend, Jimmy, a gay fellow writer. Hoping to begin anew, Kathleen takes a leave of absence and returns to her native Ireland. Memories of her homeland are disheartening. She recalls her mother as oppressed and the children as "neglected victims of her victimhood. Villain? Father. Old-style Irish Catholic patriarch; unkind to wife, unloving to children, harsh to young Kathleen when she tried to talk to him." Nonetheless, Kathleen wants "....my life given back to me, so I can live it again better." She has become fascinated by the Talbot affair, an actual event which took place during the Potato Famine, some 150 years ago. According to records, Marianne Talbot, the wife of an Anglo-Irish landowner, was seen by servants en deshabille with William Mullan, a stableman. "There could hardly have been two people less likely to be drawn to each other than an Anglo-Irish landlord's wife and an Irish servant," Ms. O'Faolain writes. "Each of them came from a powerful culture which had at its very core the defining of the other as alien." Intrigued by the disparity between the apparent lovers and the fact that Marianne is found guilty of adultery, Kathleen determines to write their story. She travels to Ballygall, site of the former Talbot estate, where she is aided in her research by Miss Leech, a feisty spinster librarian; and cosseted by Bertie, a widowed inn owner. As Kathleen delves into the past readers are reminded of the grim devastation wrought by the Famine. Those were days when the still living "had to open the pit in the top field to push in more bodies," and Marianne could hear through her drawing room window the cries for food, when "the low noise of pleading and begging swelled to shrieking." Surely few have painted the Famine's stark reality as movingly as Ms. O'Faolain. Her descriptions constrict the heart, enabling readers to see anew a mortally wounded country and its people. As Kathleen unearths surprising data about the Talbot scandal, she also discovers some truths about herself. It's at this juncture that she finds another opportunity for romance, but at what price? With "My Dream Of You" Ms. O'Faolain clearly shows that she is not only a deft memoirist, but a brilliant storyteller, a keen observer of humankind, and a compassionate chronicler of a still present past.
Rating: 
Summary: Can't like the main character
Review: I simply could not find anything sympathetic about the main character in this book. She is an irritating, self-centered, and immoral woman who created her own empty life and then whined about it. The book held flashes of interest when it dealt with the secondary story about the Famine love affair. Much of the conversation in the book is stilted. I love current Irish fiction and non-fiction, and there are much better examples of the fine writing now coming from Ireland than this novel.
Rating:
Summary: The Whole Tenderness
Review: My Dream of You is the best novel I have read in such a long while. It reminds me of Ellen Gilchrist at her wildest and most inventive, except this writer is Irish, not Southern. But she made me laugh, often, and run to read passages aloud, and I cried more than once, and through it all I was amazed at how much wholeness O' Faolain puts down in black and white, how much tenderness and anguish and forgiveness and layers under layers of buried secret griefs. I hope Nuala O'Faolain reads this because I say: Keats and Rilke would be proud. I finished the last 300 pages this Sunday in one sitting. I couldn't stop reading. Beautiful, fantastic NOVEL. Brilliantly, splendidly written. Thank you.
Rating:
Summary: More than a romance
Review: The title of this book might lead you to think that you're in for a good soppy holiday romance, and that's exactly what I thought I was buying as I headed off to the sun. Very quickly into My Dream of You, I realised that I had lucked onto something far more sophisticated and special. What a great book. The main character of the book, Kathleen, finds her life rocked after the death of her closest friend. Unsure of how to proceed with her life she throws herself into a project of investigating an ancient Irish love affair and in the process finds herself discovering some truths about herself. A gripping read - lets hope Nuala O'Faolain writes a second novel.
Rating:
Summary: I just couldn't pick up the book again
Review: It's amazing how all the reviews are divided. You either love it or hate it. I hated it and support the recommendation to save your money. I only got up to page 80 and I don't know if I can continue. The biggest problem I had was Nuala O'Faolain trying to make us feel sorry for the Irish who suffered from the famine. She usually did this in the form of questions:
(page 71) "Does dying of hunger stop hurting at some point? Like dying in snow? First-Chill-then stupor-then the letting go..."
(page 73) "I cannot forget it, I thought, yet I have no memory of it. It is not mine; but who else can own it?"
It was okay that she wrote about the conditions of the Famine, people living in ditches, unsanitary conditions. But the questions are like she is trying to shove pity down our throats. She herself seems like that she is wallowing in self-pity for the people who suffered the Famine.
It's also hard to read because Kathleen is like a person who wants to be shot out of her own misery. She has sex with people who she is not even remotely attracted to and can't admit she got anything out of it. Not attention, pleasure or connecting with somebody. She has sex so quickly, and for nothing. She has a female friend as pathetic as she is and a male one who dies in the story that was her only life and joy that she won't stop whining about.
An awful story- Nuala O'Faolain got more credit than she deserved.
Rating:
Summary: Gleaning Pangs from a Timeless Hunger
Review: One recent afternoon, whilst browsing in my neighborhood bookshop, this novel's enchantingly lovely jacket cover caught my eye. The description it bore - a story of loneliness and passion, delved within another story of loneliness and passion - seemed exactly fitting to what I'd longed to be reading at that moment. I therefore immediately procured it, took it home, and immersed myself within. I quickly found that though this wasn't the riveting, can't-put-it-down kind of read I'd been counting on, it certainly was an endearing one. Nuala O'Faolain's writing has a richly textured, yet somehow quiet quality about it, that tends to draw one intimately into the story. Kathleen de Burca is an expatriate Irishwoman on the brink of 50, who's been living in a London basement apartment and employed as a travel writer for over two decades. She's estranged from her family, and her work colleagues are her closest intimate friends. When her best friend suddenly dies, she is not only slapped full in the face with a grief she has never before known, but confronted also with the devastating realization that she is truly and utterly alone, and that her present course precludes that she will be so for the remainder of her life. Kathleen never does come right out and say it, but the terror and despair she feels is palpable. So she packs up and moves out of her basement apartment (and I must herein state that even though I applauded Kathleen's decision, I felt terribly sorry for "Next Door's Cat," with whom she had shared many of her dinners). She then takes indefinite leave from her job to journey back to Ireland to investigate a divorce case from a century-and-a-half ago, which occurred toward the end of the Irish Potato Famine: a case which had fascinated her ever since she had learnt of it while in her mid-20's. The divorce case involves an affair between the English wife of an Irish landlord and their Irish servant -- and what makes the case so fascinating, at least to Kathleen is, in her words: "I was interested, always, in any story about passion, so I was interested in Mrs. Talbot and William Mullan. I believed in passion the way other people believed in God: everything fell into place around it. Even before I started mooching around after boys when I was fourteen, I'd understood, watching my mother, that passion was the name of the thing she was pursuing, as she trawled through novel after novel. And it was extraordinary to me that the Talbot affair happened when it did- just after the very worst year of the potato famine." In Ireland, Kathleen stays with an earthy and agreeable Irish family, and makes friends with a few of the local personalities. Her past is deeply painful, and it keeps creeping into her thoughts. She briefly visits her brother and his wife and child, who are the only family she has left in Ireland; then she meets a married man, and finally gets a taste of the passion she'd been barren of for so many years. Meantime, she's fleshing out her story of the Talbot affair, but in the end her discoveries are not only rare and hard to come by, but are actually materializing into something quite bleak. Her depictions of the massive devastation caused by the famine are, in fact, some of the most shocking and heart-wrenching passages I've ever read. In the end, it's essentially Kathleen discovering Herself, and in the very essence of that word: she discovers her past, her family, her heritage, her country, her regrets, her longings, her failings, and even her own unique beauty. The factual lives of Marianne Talbot and William Mullan may remain forever shrouded in mystery - for it's most likely that their affair never even took place - but their starving ghosts certainly embody vivid life in O'Faolain's writing:
"The habitat of their passion, where they roamed like two animals on a great plain, was silence. Not perfect silence-- there were always the sounds of the household and sounds coming in from the estate. Sheep, penned in a front yard. The creak of turf carts coming in from the bog. But the couple were habitually mute. Except that they panted and grunted when they forgot themselves in each other. Then afterwards there was peace, and silence again. And after that, she lived in a hot dream of him."
Rating: 
Summary: What an Empty Existence
Review: My Dream of You is told in the first person perspective of Kathleen De Burca. A woman of a particular age (fiftyish), she's led an empty, sad existence her entire life. She lives in the same dungeonesque flat in London as she had for the past umpteenth year. She works as a travel writer for the same small publication for as many years, with the same drab coworkers. Single, Kathleen's life consists of a series of brief affairs and one night stands as she searches for something she will never find because she doesn't know what she's looking for. After Jimmy, her best friend and coworker dies suddenly of a heart attack, Kathleen comes to a crossroads in her life. Quitting her ho-hum job, she travels to her homeland of Ireland in hopes of writing a novel on the infamous Talbot divorce which occurred during the Potato Famine. Kathleen begins writing a rather sordid, ficticious account of the doomed union of the Talbots, but eventually has to abandon her imagined take on the scandal as evidence is uncovered which sheds new light of the people involved. I found this a rambling, boring read. Kathleen has so many flash backs, it's hard to stay interested in the present plot.
I had much higher hopes for this book.
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