“Dancing at Lughnasa” is the story of five unmarried sisters living in a cottage just outside the fictional Ballybeg; a microcosm of rural Ireland. Their story is told by the grown up love child of the youngest sister, Chris. As a young man he casts his mind back to late Summer 1936, when he was seven, and he relates some of the events that are going to change his, and the sisters lives forever: the arrival of Uncle Jack who, after twenty-five years as a missionary in a remote village in Uganda, has been sent home for “going native”; the purchase of a Marconi wireless set, and Gerry’s, his absent father’s, two visits during that summer, and the arrival of a knitting factory; the industrial revolution has finally caught up with Ballybeg.
