Description: The narrator of this wild, highly inventive tale is the orphan Dervla O'Shannon, dubbed "Thistle" because she is "skinny and prickly and unwanted". Reared at Saint Martha's Home for Foundling Girls until the age of puberty, her world is circumscribed by scrubbing floors, washing up the kitchen, and competing with thirty others for the attention of the Foundling Mother. Forced to pay entertainment calls on some of Ireland's national heroes sequestered at Saint Clement's home for Old Soldiers, Dervla is assigned to Corporal Stack, a wry malcontent, veteran of the First World War and old enough to be Dervla's grandfather. There follows an improbable and uproarious courtship between the two, their escape from their respective institutions, Dervla's endless stream of letters to the Foundling Mother, "true in sentiment but in every other way as false as a cat". Corporal Stack suffers a shocking injury, and the pair are taken in captivity to Great Manor, an Anglo-Irish estate inhabited only by a "young mistress" (a girl very like Dervla herself), her drunken brother, and a host of desolate babies. In a wonderfully unpredictable ending, the ever optimistic Dervla at last discovers the love and satisfaction she has been seeking throughout her adventures.

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