Nuanced fiction set in the 1960s through 1980s in Ireland, Spain, and Cyprus, about two women, Calista and Pilar. They are not related, except peripherally through ties to the wealthy Demitriades family. It is a story of questionable choices driven by youthful impulse and a feeling of being in love. Unfortunately, these choices have painful ramifications.

Calista, an Irish 17-year-old, is swept off her feet by an older man, marries, and moves to the family home in Cyprus. She finds out about his jealousy and violent tendencies too late. Pilar escapes poverty in her home town and moves to Madrid. With the guidance of a family friend, she eventually owns property and supports herself. She impetuously gets involved with a married man, leading to consequences that shape her life.

This book starts with death. It then unfolds gradually, as we get to know the back-story of what happened. The author has a way of bringing the characters to life through her well-crafted language. It felt a bit choppy at times, jumping between the two primary protagonists’ stories. Themes include: struggles of women in a patriarchal culture, the influences of family, and the ramifications of choices. Recommended to readers of tragedies, stories of revenge, or slow-burning, character-driven novels about family relationships. Contains descriptions of domestic violence.
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This book kept me wondering to the end. I am trying to include more contemporary fiction in my reading and while this one did go back and forward in time it is a tale of love, hate, betrayal and revenge more than anything else. It entwines the lives of two women who are wrapped up with the men of the same family although they don’t know each other and it is only fate (karma? kismet?) that even brings them into each other’s orbit.

Calista is a young girl in Ireland who longs to escape what she feels is her boring life with her parents. As is the case with most teenagers she feels she knows more than her mother and longs to break out and see the world. She thinks that escape is going to come by way of her relationship with a work colleague of her father. She dates this older man behind her parent’s back and soon she is getting married not realizing that his “devotion” is nothing more than obsessive possession.

Pilar’s story is not as clearly defined and in some ways it seems to be there only as a foil for Calista’s revenge. She is the daughter of an abusive man married to a woman who loved another. As her mother lays dying she tells Pilar to get out of their small village – do it NOW she says or you never will. She gives her some money she had hidden and the name of a lawyer in the city who will help her. Pilar suspects this is the man her mother loves.

Calista withers within her marriage and finally cracks and tries to leave but her husband’s family is powerful. She gets away but cannot take her children. It’s a devastating choice but one she feels she must make because she doesn’t think she will survive otherwise. Pilar, on the other hand blossoms. She works hard, saves and invests with the help of the lawyer and soon finds herself wealthy. Wealthy but not necessarily happy. She has not found love. But then one day she meets a man and she falls hard. The only problem – he’s married. But that doesn’t stop Pilar from falling in love, even though he is honest in that he will never leave his wife.

At this point it gets hard to further discuss the plot without spoiling some of the twists and turns. And there are a lot of twists and turns. It’s part of what makes the book such an interesting read. It’s also part of what makes the book such a head shaker – you just wonder at the coincidences. But if you can just ignore that little voice in your head and just read you will find yourself in a real page turner of a book. It’s not perfect but it does bring you full circle on the odd turns of life. ( )

The Years That Followed, Irish writer Catherine Dunne's tenth novel, is a tale of two women who do not know each other but who have one thing in common that comes very close to ruining both their lives: the Petros Demitriades family. Petros Demitriades, as it turns out, is a wealthy Cypriot who made his fortune from the hugely profitable shipping company whose management he hopes one day to turn over to his four sons.

Calista, daughter of an affluent Irishman and his Spanish wife, falls in love with Alexandros, the youngest of the four Demitriades sons, when the young man comes to Dublin to represent his father in a new business arrangement between the two families. Pilar, whose parents are impoverished farmers from the Extremadura region of southwest Spain, is so determined to escape the life she seems destined to live that she flees to Madrid in search of a better future. There, with help and guidance from an old friend of her mother's, Pilar is justifiably proud of the new life she creates for herself. But it is her misfortune that the first time in her life that she falls in love it is with a married man: Petros Demitriades, the father of Calista's lover and eventual husband.

Neither of the two women's lives will ever be the same.

The Years That Followed is a novel of revenge, one in which one of its two main characters is so callously mistreated that eventually she can think of little else other than getting even with the man responsible for causing her a lifetime of grief. By then, the other main character has sworn off of men except for the occasional one-night stand she treats herself to - and so much regrets the next morning. Dunne's plot is a well choreographed one in which Calista and Pilar deal with the same people while managing to remain completely unaware of each other's existence. The author alternates the present day action of 1989 with flashbacks to the previous decades as she tells her story, a story that relies largely on coincidence to reach its ultimate climax - and it should be noted that readers willing to suspend their sense of disbelief are going to enjoy the novel a good bit more than those unable to do so.

For the most part, I managed to suspend my own sense of disbelief (although there were moments I really had to work hard to get there) right up until the point that the novel's final big "reveal" is made. That revelation, necessary as it may be to tie up all of the novel's loose ends, did, I have to admit, leave me groaning at the sheer implausibility of what I had just read. The book’s climax is so held together by coincidence and luck, in fact, that its lack of believability overwhelms everything that precedes it. ( )