I wasn't too impressed with this one. This is my first Maeve Binchy novel and it fell flat for me. If she wanted to have so many complex characters, then she should have made it an epic, like The Thornbirds, or else cut some people out and let us really get to know the juicy details. Each character was a novel in itself. It's a shame she didn't let them develop more because there were some great issues brewing there. At the end, nothing really changed for the good or the bad. It was very anti-climatic.