Ordinary Human Failings

In 1990, on a London council estate, a small girl is found dead, and suspicion settles on the Greens, a withdrawn Irish immigrant family. The household is made up of John, his alcoholic son Richie, his guarded daughter Carmel, and Carmel's ten-year-old daughter Lucy, who was the last person seen with the dead child. As a tabloid journalist circles the family hoping for a scoop, Nolan moves back through their lives in Waterford and London, showing how poverty, an unwanted pregnancy, drink, and decades of silence shaped each of them long before the day the press arrived to take them apart.