Fanny Lynch

Fanny Lynch is the protagonist and first person narrator of the novel. She is born Franny Stone, and her parents are Iris Stone and Dominic Stewart. When Franny is just a baby, her mother leaves Dominic and moves back to Ireland from Australia. Franny grows up with her mother in a small shack near the ocean, never having met her father. As a young girl, Franny is curious and wild. She frequently runs away from home, much to her mother's distress. When she is 10, she runs away with a friend. When she returns home, she finds her mother's hanged body in a tree outside the house. She then moves to Australia to live with her paternal grandmother, Edith, who Franny resents. She spends the remainder of her childhood simultaneously trying to understand and escape her parental past.

Years later, living again in Galway, she works as a...