MY DREAM OF YOU

Overwhelmed by a midlife crisis at 49, travel writer Kathleen Burke trades in her lonely if glamorously globe-trotting lifestyle to return to her native Ireland and confront the ghosts of a terrible childhood after 30 years away. She's researching a book on a notorious Famine-era love affair between an Anglo-Irish landlord's wife and an Irish servant -- a tricky, not-quite-as-it-seems scandal related here as a novel-within-a-novel. Though Kathleen's gift-of-gab-fueled narration feels somewhat overwritten, Irish journalist O'Faolain's first novel (after her critically acclaimed 1998 memoir Are You Somebody?) ingeniously explores the consuming power of both passion and the past. B+