Room for a Single Lady - Clare Boylan

To Eugene Rafferty, girls are like money - they have to be saved. Despite living in 1950s Dublin, his three daughters, Bridie, Kitty and Rose, seem doomed to a Victorian childhood.

However, as fortunes decline the Rafferty's are forced to take in lodgers and these independent but eccentric outsiders introduce the girls to new experiences - sex and superstition, of spite, of true love and tragedy.

For in a world caught between the aftershock of the war and the transforming liberalism of the 1960s there are two states of womanhood: single, and caught up in the comic and desperate search for a suitable husband, or married and enduring the claustrophobia of suburban life.

Evoking the magic of childhood and adolescence with rare subtlety, wit and warmth, ROOM FOR A SINGLE LADY is both delightfully comic and genuinely moving.