This spare volume is effectively hypnotic, bringing the reader into the world of the narrator and including him or her in her darknesses and her hesitant acceptances of small happinesses. We wonder what it is that has hurt her, but there is nothing cheap or conveniently resolvable about this book, which deepens its impact and makes it seem that much more real.

The narrator writes of her life in Italy, while remembering her past with an aloof distance. She has what could be rich relationships with a neighborwoman and her family and with an American she meets abroad. But there is a reason she is living away from home (in Ireland), and the light and stone of the title come to embody her memories.

It's a brilliant work and highly recommended.

Kate O'Brien's parlor-set piece about a 19th Century Irish family at the time of the lingering death of the family's mother is spare and relentless. The author evokes through a series of character foils the conflicts between the 19th Century Irish Catholic milieu in which the characters exist and the very real and human passions that they develop at odds with their circumstances. The narrative voice is sympathetic, yet quick to point up the character flaws in each of the family members portrayed in this novel filled with misplaced passions and passionless near misses. Although this is a short novel, it is not a quick read. It instead is a patient, quiet, well-constructed but not particularly novel portrayal of the contrasts between life as we imagine it and life as it really is lived. I recommend the Ante-Room, but it is not for the impatient or faint of heart.

I couldn't put it down! The book describes three days in an Irish household. Very atmospheric, and yet the writing is so easy and natural to read. There is unrequited love, and almost every other emotion it is possible to think of. Highly recomended