August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg in Donegal and the adultMichael Evans recounts growing up in his aunts’ cottage when he was seven years old.

These were the late summer days when love briefly seemed possible for three of the five Mundy sisters. The family welcomes home their frail elder brother, returning mysteriously from a life as a missionary in Africa. Set against the Celtic Harvest Festival of Lughnasa, Gerry, Michael’s father, stirs up the sisters’ emotions, with his dancing and his dreams. But this Pagan festival proves to be a time for reaping what has been sown.

“Friel has the Chekhovian gift of simultaneously seeing his people from the outside, feeling them from the inside and knowing what they are thinking about each other even when they are silent…there is no doubting we are in the thrall of as masterly a dramatist as the theatre possesses” The Times