Works by
Lisa Carey
(Writer)

The Mermaids Singing (1998)
There is an island off the west coast of Ireland called Inis Murúch -- the Island of the Mermaids -- a world where myth is more powerful than truth, and love can overcome even death. It is here that Lisa Carey sets her lyrical and sensual first novel, weaving together the voices and lives of three generations of Irish and Irish-American women.

Years ago, the fierce and beautiful Grace stole away from the island with her small daughter, Gráinne, unable to bear its isolation. Now Gráinne is motherless at fifteen, and a grandmother she has never met has come to take her back. Her heart is pulled between a life in which she no longer belongs and a family she cannot remember. But only on Inis Murúch can she begin to understand the forces that have torn her family apart.

Love in the Asylum (2004)
Can love save those who believe they are beyond redemption? That is the question at the heart of this eagerly anticipated new novel by the acclaimed author of In the Country of the Young and The Mermaids Singing, an utterly remarkable tale of salvation at the last possible moment in the last place imaginable.

Alba Elliot is tired of being crazy. In and out of Abenaki Mental Hospital more than a dozen times in ten years, fed up with diagnoses that come without cures and a life organized by a days-of-the-week pill case, the twenty-five-year-old children's book writer is waiting for a miracle.

Oscar Jameson, a thirty-year-old drug addict enrolled in the rehab program by his frustrated brother, is not looking for anything so profound. Oscar doesn't believe he has a problem, despite the fact that his "recreation" has cost him everything.

He resents the counselors, the other addicts, and his brother, all of whom insist he belongs there. The only activity Oscar looks forward to is the spirited, sarcastic conversations that have begun with Alba on the hospital lawn.

And so two damaged souls forge a connection.

To call it love would be courting disaster since no bright future could possibly exist between a suicidal manic-depressive and a self-deluding junkie.

Then one day, in the back pages of a hospital library book, Alba finds a letter written seventy years earlier but never sent. Mary Doherty, who was committed by her husband and taken from her children, left behind secret missives about the atrocities done to her and her belief in an ancient healing power. As Alba pieces together Mary's heartbreaking chronicle, she begins to set her hopes on a different kind of medicine.

Brought together by chance, influenced by forces as beautiful and powerful as they are unforeseen, Alba and Oscar will slowly rise from the ashes of despair and self-destruction and, in the midst of righting an old wrong, begin to heal their battered spirits. A superbly crafted, poignant narrative of tragedy and triumph, Lisa Carey's moving third novel is a testament to the surprising resilience of the human heart.

In the Country of the Young (2000)
From Lisa Carey, critically acclaimed author of The Mermaids Singing, comes an evocative, hauntingly beautiful tale of grief, love, and redemption. She came to them from the sea . . .

On a stormy November night in 1848, a ship carrying more than one hundred Irish emigrants to America's shores ran aground twenty miles off the coast of Maine. Many were saved, but some were not--including a young girl who died crying out the name of her brother. A century and a half later, the descendants of the survivors still remember that fateful voyage and the children who lost their lives to the sea.

In the present day, the artist Oisin MacDara lives in self-imposed exile on Tiranogue--the small island where the shipwrecked Irish settled. The past is Oisin's curse, as memories of the twin sister who died tragically when he was a boy haunt him still. In the isolated community he inhabits, life is so separated from mainland influences that an Irish lilt still flavors the islanders' speech. But Oisin's lingering pain is so great that even in this intimate place he has been incapable of forming a single meaningful relationship.

Then on a quiet All Hallows' Eve, a restless spirit is beckoned into his home by a candle flickering in the window: the ghost of the girl whose brief life ended on Tiranogue's shore more than a century earlier. In Oisin's house she seeks comfort and warmth, and a chance at the life that was denied her so long ago. For an empty man chained by painful memories, nothing will ever be the same again.

In the Country of the Young is a luminous modern fable of a heart's reawakening and an unforgettable journey back to the country of the living.

Every Visible Thing (2006) -- Finalist, 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction
The Fureys are a family divided in time. Five years ago, the eldest son, Hugh, left home in the middle of the night and never returned. After two years of exhausting and fruitless searching, his parents, estranged by grief, try to put the tragedy behind them. His mother recovers from an emotional breakdown by losing herself in a new career. His father, having lost his faith as well as his position as a theology professor, takes on the role of caregiver for their remaining two children with lackluster effort.

Owen and Lena, left to fend for themselves, hold on to the memory of their brother with increasingly self-destructive obsessions. Ten-year-old Owen, prompted by the iconic angels in his father's former study, calls on Hugh as a guardian angel as his own sexual experimentation turns dangerous. Fifteen-year-old Lena explores drugs, boys, and truancy, and begins a search for Hugh—and for herself—through the lens of his old camera. As she spirals increasingly out of control, she forces the family to face their past . . . and find a future.

A moving, lyrically written novel that captures the darkness of adolescence and the complex relationships within a family, Lisa Carey's Every Visible Thing is a story born of grief and disillusionment that is ultimately a testament to the power of hope, faith, and love.