The Dawning (The Old Jest): Jennifer Johnston

Late summer near Dublin, 1920, and up at the big house there are still cucumber sandwiches for tea. Eighteen year old Nancy gives Aunt Mary and dotty Grandfather the slip and goes down to the seashore to dream in the beach hut, write in her Diary and wait - longing for her life to begin. The Dublin newspapers are full of distant bombings and shootings. Even before she meets the mysterious fugitive on the beach, Nancy has begun to sense that the old life - the charmed lives of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy - cannot go on forever. Cover shows Cover shows Sir Anthony Hopkins and Rebecca Pidgeon as Cassius and Nancy in the 1988 film.