This book had such praise and wonderful reviews that I could not wait to read it.

It started off well enough, but I soon realized that it wasn't so much a novel with a plot, but a series of dismal snapshots into the tarnished life of a boring family. There were just too many family members with similare traits to keep straight. I wish that there had been more of Molly's boarding school experience; that part was interesting. By the end I was tired of the family, the repitition of the lamenting of a gentile life lost etc.

If you want an Irish coming of age in the 50s/60s any of Maeve Binchy's earlier books will be much more captivating!

Such a gentle and evocative book.Lovers of times past will adore this book.Molly is the daughter of a second son of an impoverished,aristocratic Anglo-Irish family-a family,which in her fathers words lost all of its money,importance and place in the scheme of things after W.W.1. I was as enchanted-as indeed Molly still is,by the sheer beauty of the main manor house,Fromore,now owned by her fathers elder brother,and of the Dower House,Fern Hill,originally the place where widows of the owners of the estate,moved to upon the death of their husbands.The gardens,rather run-down now,and the furnishings of the houses are old,solid and in impeccably good taste-something that new money can't buy,but the ability to maintain these properties is becoming more and more difficult as death duties amd other taxes eat away at the rather meagre incomes of the present owners.This a gently sad book-a story of a particular breed of people who are fighting,unsucessfully to stem the tide and realise the fact that they are the last of their line who will be able to keep up the appearances of wealth and gentility .

I love reading novels; I try to read the very best ones. There isn't room here to define "best" as I understand it, but often I must read works that are one to two hundred years old before I feel certain that the literary fiction in my lap rates with "the best." Fine, latter-day works like Walker Percy's The Moviegoer or (very recently) David Long's The Falling Boy seemed thin on the ground, to say the least.

So imagine my surprise, a few years ago, upon reading a novel that made me wonder about that axiom offered up by the late Irish novelist Frank O'Connor -- that the secret of writing novels died with Jane Austen and Turgenev. The novel that turned my head was The Dower House by one Annabel Davis-Goff. I read it, then returned to the beginning and read it again. Several weeks later, I read it for a third time. Not being an academic, this is something I just don't ordinarily do.

The Dower House is, in my opinion, the best traditional novel written during the past 40 years. Moreover, I'd be hard pressed to think of a single novel I've read that I've found so enjoyable, so utterly consuming -- OK, one not written by Austen, James, or Wharton (fairly select company).

If The Dower House were nothing but a coming-of-age novel, it could hold up its head with anything written since the time of Stendahl and Dickens. But the book offers much more, touching as it does on some of the more important (and distressing) social issues of our time. (Many readers from the American South will feel right at home reading of the plight of the Anglo-Irish at mid-century.) And the prose is delicious: every work fits, every paragraph gives pleasure.

As for the young heroine, Molly Hassard, one will read a great many novels before finding a character as likeable and credible as Molly. So many readers would enjoy this book, and it seems downright unjust that so few people seem to have heard of it.

I finished this book only because it was assigned by my book club. It reminds me of the books I read in sixth and seventh grade, found in the "Young Adult" section of my neighborhood library in the l950's. Everything about the book, both plot and character development, as well as use of language, is thin, without depth or complexity or passion. If one likes simple reading, and this is a novel of simple reading, I would recommend Catherine Cookson. At least, she has great stories told with feeling.

I read this over one weekend. Daisy Creed is like any good Austen heroine. She's plucky, determined, and Davis-Goff spices up rich writing with biting commentary on the manners and motivations of a different time and place. I can't say I knew anything about Ireland before I read the book. Now I want to go there. I just fear that sixty years after the action of this book takes place, I won't find what I'm looking for anywhere except in another novel.

I loved this book! After reading Davis-Goff's first novel, The Dower House, I rushed out and bought This Cold Country. I was not disappointed. Davis-Goff writes beautifully, and her story of Daisy Creed, a land girl who marries an Irish officer and then must cope alone with his eccentric family in a chilly house in Ireland, is a page-turner. I had to put my life on hold so I could finish this book. Daisy is a truly sympathetic character, a reader of Dickens, a giggler, and too young and polite to question her in-laws about their customs. I would have loved to have her as a friend when I was younger.

I'm shocked to see all these one-star reviews. Did we read the same book?