In a series of photographs that Derry Moore took of the Duchess de Mouchy’s house and garden, there is an incredibly striking portrait of an elderly woman in a blue smock mending some linen with the caption ‘archetypal housekeeper’. I thought of that photograph often when I was imagining Lilly Bere, the narrator of this exquisite rendering of a simple life. Lilly is an Irish cook who has spent her retirement living in a cottage in the Hamptons, after working for a powerful and wealthy American family for decades. But her story begins in Ireland at the age of four as she meditates on the unpredictable memories of childhood: a necklace broken, a dancing bear, her brother’s copy of Dostoevsky returned from the front.

The opening sentence ‘What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?’ sets in place a lyrical reflection of a life lived in friendship, love, duty and grief. Told over a period of 17 days, each chapter is a day. Beginning with ‘First Day without Bill’, Lilly reflects on pivotal episodes in her life as she tries to come to terms with the death of her only grandson.

For so simple a premise, Barry delivers a quiet masterpiece that I am sure will be remembered as a classic. His prose is an assembly of majestic dialogue (‘now I am seeing you, I know everything he did say about you was true, and I am only so glad that I met you, indeed I am’) and revelatory observations (‘telling my tale to myself … old matters held in the fingers of memory, like those old beads in a family rosary’).

This is a novel that deserves to be read slowly and more than once. It has the same deliberate pace of Colm Toíbin’s novel Brooklyn and is hauntingly beautiful.

Justine Douglas is from Readings Port Melbourne