After several years of wandering around Europe, Australian-born Scully, his wife, Jennifer, and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, decide to settle down in a ramshackle old house in rural Ireland. Jennifer and Billie return to Australia to settle their affairs, while Scully stays behind to make the house habitable. Several months later, Scully is to meet them at Shannon Airport, but only Billie emerges from the plane. Scully sets off on an obsessive chase through their old haunts in Europe in a desperate search for Jennifer, dragging his daughter with him. What follows is very strange: it's a ghost story, but the ghosts make only two brief appearances; it's a love story in which we never meet one of the lovers; it's a picuresque journey where the sights are never described.

For the first 50 pages I was sure this would become one of my favorite books of the year. I was captivated by Winton's brilliant prose and his intriguing premise: Scully's wife Jennifer flies from Australia to join him in Ireland but doesn't get off the plane. Their daughter Billie does, but won't tell what happened to her mother. I felt nicely set up for a fine tale of suspense, as Scully sets off to find Jennifer. There was some suspense but when I finished the book I was frustrated and enraged. Furthermore, why couldn't we learn what happened to Jennifer? The only clue is Billie's impression on the plane that her mother's face was turning to marble. Not very helpful. One must conclude that Winton doesn't want us to understand, he wants us to accept the mystery without the resolution. That seems to be the message of the horsemen who gathered near the ruined Irish castle, twice -- their symbolism escapes me completely.

I was also disappointed with the acts of child abuse throughout the story. A mother abandons her daughter who now cannot speak of it, a the father drags her all over Europe with very little money, meager food and living conditions, while she keeps begging to leave and go home. She is bitten horribly by a dog but Scully doesn't have enough time to have her treated properly when it becomes infected; he spends most of this time drunk, runs from suspicion of murder, and ends up in jail on Christmas Day. I loved him at the beginning of the book when he was preparing a home for his family in Ireland, but hated him by the time the book was done.

The beginning of the book gets a 5 -- the rest of the book is a 1. . .