A Chain of Dreams

About the Book

If flame-haired Tish O’Reagan had not accepted a scholarship to study voice production at the Trinity College of Music in Dublin, her parents would have continued to run their 3,000 acre mixed farming property in the Central Western Slopes of New South Wales. However, because she did accept it, her parents, Nell and Padraic, and spirited sister, Louise, accompany her and become temporary residents of Dublin, leaving ‘Ballycahill’ in the hands of reliable Dominic and cheeky young Hugh.

The family bring their unique Australian-ness to all they meet, helping many to find solutions to major problems. Does this bring respect or resentment, and will Louise find healing from her recent broken romance in a Sydney hospital, or will her reluctance to risk being hurt again prove an insurmountable barrier to a new relationship? Will Dominic succeed in helping his young and vulnerable brother through the disillusionment of his first brush with romance, or will he be forever slightly scarred by it? And most importantly, how will Tish, the adored youngest child, handle the constant study and huge diversity of her chosen course, and the harassment of a few jealous students in the Academy?

Read this endearing and sometimes humorous story of an ordinary Australian family, placed in an unfamiliar country, and note how each finds a niche there, and manages to retain their true Australian identity through it all.

About the Author

Margaret Dwyer was born in Orange in 1929 and educated at St Joseph’s College, Perthville, near Bathurst. There she honed her musical skills and subsequently gave pleasure to many, singing and playing the piano well into her eighties.

After her marriage, farming and rearing seven children occupied her, until at the age of eighty- two, and while nursing her husband Frank through his final illness, she wrote and published her autobiography, ‘With a Song in my Heart.’ She followed this with, ‘Jewels along the Newell’ which was published in 2014.

Now in her eighty-seventh year, she reveals her love of the land and her modern and youthful outlook on life in her first work of fiction, ‘A Chain of Dreams.’ Margaret has nineteen grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren and lives in Parkes, a town she describes as “A great place in which to grow old.”