Time Present and Time Past

Fintan Buckley is a pleasant, rather conventional and unimaginative man, who works as a legal adviser in an import/export firm in Dublin. He lives in Howth and is married with two sons who are at university, and a small daughter. As he goes about his life, Fintan begins to experience states of altered consciousness and auditory hallucinations, which seem to take him out of a linear experience of time. Over the years he becomes distanced from his family, and in the course of the novel this link is re-established and helps to bring him understanding and peace, although in a most unexpected way.