The island cliffs are, he says, more “rugged” and “wild” than those in England: a fanciful notion, fraught with dubious politics. The visitors are here to paint, to record, to celebrate - so they say - this island and its purity, the language all but vanished across the water. The artist John Lavery painted her portrait (his wife was the model) and that painting was used on Irish banknotes from the foundation of the Irish state in 1922 right up to the 1970s.

The novel is set over the summer of 1979, easily dated for readers by reporting of the assassination of Louis Mountbatten in August 1979. Lloyd takes the last leg by currach, though boats with engines are available and he doesn't much like the sea. Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.In her 20s and 30s, she travelled extensively, first as a student, living in Germany and Australia, where she taught English; later as a journalist, covering, among many other issues, the war in Bosnia, child labour in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the impact of Perestroika on Central Asia.

The writing is expressive, with various motifs running through it – like rabbits, apples, smells – and refrains, like “young widow island woman”.Maraid watches her son, James, striding out across the grass, a bottle of milk for each of their visitors in hand. As you can probably tell by now, The Colony serves up a peculiar combination of the oblique and the overt. But when an English artist visits his west of Ireland island, James becomes completely schooled in art over the course of one brief summer. These two visitors, aided by Micheál who is determined to make as much money as possible, stay close by in cottages near Mairead, her son James, her mother and grandmother. But, while it reports on a lot of Northern violence, because they are all the same island, the setting is not there.