SOURCE: "Nobody's Child," in The New York Times Book Review, July 9, 1995, p. 6.

[Messud is a novelist. In the favorable review below, in which she discusses the plot and theme of Mother of Pearl, Messud notes Morrissy's focus on Irish society, despair, and "the violent movement between the external and the internal."]

The narrative of an infant stolen from its parents is necessarily a double one, demanding accounts both of one family's loss and of another's joyous gain. But Mother of Pearl, a fine first novel by the Irish writer Mary Morrissy, goes further, acknowledging the triple nature of the tale: two families live through this momentous event and its consequences, but so too does the child caught between them.

Divided into three main sections, Mother of Pearl explores the internal lives of three Irishwomen linked by the theft of a baby. Their conflicts are reflected in those of...