The Dancers Dancing

"It is 1972: a group of teenagers, some from Dublin, some from Derry, are spending a month in a Donegal Gaeltacht, learning Irish language and culture from their teachers and from the local people they are boarding with. Liberated for the first time from the restricting reins of parental control, they respond to the untamed landscape of river, hill and sea, finding in it unnerving echoes of their own submerged - and now emerging - wildnesses." "In this complex new novel, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, uses the experiences and emotions of girls on the cusp of womanhood to explore dangerous territories of sex, politics, class, and Irishness."--BOOK JACKET.

Prize history

• Orange Prize for Fiction

  2000

  Shortlist