The Irish have a reputation, deserved or not, for being storytellers, drinkers and fighters, not necessarily in that order. Eighty-four-year-old Maurice Hannigan, the gruff, unsparing narrator of Dublin-born writer Anne Griffin's satisfying first novel, When All Is Said, is no exception. 

Without informing his son, Maurice has sold his home and farm, given away his dog and told everyone he is retiring to a nursing home. First, though, is a nightlong stop at the well-appointed bar of the Rainsford House Hotel, where Maurice will raise a glass five times to five different people, and remember, as he says, "All that I have been and all that I will never be again."

Maurice's full and prosperous life is now filled with ghosts: the older brother he watched waste away with tuberculosis; his daughter, Molly, a stillborn he held for just 15 minutes but has seen every day of his life; and his beloved wife, Sadie, who has been dead two years to the day he steps into the bar. His son, whom he loves with a fierceness more evident for his inability to express it, lives across the ocean in New Jersey and has a family of his own. 

So it's alone Maurice sits, toasting and remembering. In a rough-hewn voice smoothed by whiskey and as mesmerizing as a coiled cobra, he spills out a life of joy and regrets, full of tender love and bitter, enduring hatred, by turns accepting his sins and mitigating them. As he toasts and talks, a mystery surfaces. Why, after all those close-mouthed decades, is Maurice finally opening up? Is he really going to a nursing home, a place he's about as well-suited for as for a yurt? Or does he have another destination in mind? 

Griffin, the author of numerous short stories, is an exciting new voice in Irish literature. Her versatility makes When All Is Said a pleasure to read. Maurice's story is told with wry humor and pathos that avoids sentimentality, giving us a clear-eyed look at a man fumbling with a question we all must eventually face: What do you do with your life when all you have left are memories and regrets?

Winner of the John McGahern Award for Literature, Irish author Griffin offers a debut whose protagonist unfolds his life story by ordering five different drinks at the Rainford House Hotel and toasting his tragic older brother, his sorrowful sister-in-law, his daughter of 15 minutes, his son in America, and the wife he misses dearly.

DEBUT A successful County Meath dairyman, 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan, enters a hotel bar on a July evening in 2014 to toast five people who have significantly influenced his life. Maurice's praises are solitary and silent, addressed to an imagined audience: his son living in America. Each toast occasions an account of events that have shaped Maurice's existence, revelations of secrets he's kept, and explanations of decisions he's made, some of which have destroyed lives. Maurice also considers the nature of chance and how our decisions can create as well as confound opportunity. When all is said and done, Maurice abandons regret while making a full reckoning of his losses to embrace a certain kind of peace. Newcomer Griffin's storytelling, while economical, is rich and evocative, and her deft pacing maintains suspense across several narrative arcs spanning multiple time lines. Her gift for characterization is so powerful that a commemorative coin becomes one of the book's most compelling characters. Most impressive, of course, is her creation of Maurice. His voice is credible, his story absorbing, and his humanity painfully familiar. VERDICT Highly recommended; this unforgettable first novel introduces Griffin as a writer to watch. [See Prepub Alert, 9/24/18.]—John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Griffin's satisfactory debut takes place during one night in June 2014, at a hotel bar in a small Irish city. Talkative Maurice Hannigan, 84, has settled down for a long night of drinking, with each of his drinks raised to some absent loved one: his older brother, a stillborn daughter, his disturbed sister-in-law, his deceased wife, and his son, Kevin, who has moved to America to work and raise a family. Addressing that son in his mind throughout the novel, Maurice ranges back and forth through a life that began in poverty and ended with his buying up much of the county. Key to the story are Maurice's impulsive pocketing of a rare coin when he was a boy working in the manor that has now become the hotel where he is drinking, and the conflicts between Maurice's struggling family and the wealthy one that used to control life in their county. While the plot hinges heavily on coincidence, and the device of addressing an absent son feels extraneous, Maurice is a likable and complex character with a voice that readers will be drawn to. Maurice's humor, his keen observations on class and family, and his colloquial language, as well as Griffin's strong sense of place, create the feeling of a life connected to many others by strands of affection and hatred. (Mar.)