Photographs and Souvenirs

Still in the twilight of her beauty, but drained of love for her alcoholic husband, Stella Ryan falls into a trap of deliverance set by a coarse but young and handsome opportunist while her two boys, Lou and Joe, missing the father they adore, befriend a combat vet who, secretly tormented by his role in the war against the Japanese in the South Pacific, enters their lives on a mission to protect them from the predator he suspects is out to trade their mother's life for her money.

Of Photographs and Souvenirs Billy O'Callaghan (Irish Book Award winner, 2013; book critic/reviewer, Irish Examiner) has written:

"Patrick Leahy's Photographs and Souvenirs is among the finest achievements I've read in recent years, a gripping and beautifully nuanced story of a family in deepest turmoil. The prose is quiet and then, in moments, breathlessly raw; the story, delivered in vivid, tensile prose, is utterly compelling and exposes with an almost surgical precision the deepest and most complex aspects of human interaction. Patrick Leahy is a remarkably gifted writer and this novel deserves a wide, enthusiastic audience."
- Billy O'Callaghan, author of the Irish Book Award-winning The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind