Amazing. Been sitting on my shelf for nearly 20 years. something impelled me to pick it up and it's quite a page turner. Unlike most of Trollope's work which is set in middle or upper class England, this is Ireland under English rule. Featuring the poor the rough the crooked and the occasional more respectable person. the eponymous McDermots are landowners mortgaged to the hilt with little education chasing their tenants for rent without much success. They vaguely claim descent from Irish royalty but you'd hardly know it. Trollope's ability, in this his first novel, to get inside the culture, the power relationships, the legal processes is astonishing - not to mention the varying ways of speaking, including smatterings of Gaelic. And a gripping story, simple enough in outline, full of vivid scenes and diverse characters. ( )

I read this book because it was the first in a complete works of Anthony Trollope that I'd bought for my Kindle. It was only after that I learned that this was a mistake and that this was not the Trollope novel to start with. (That, at least according to many on the internet, being The Warden.)

I didn't dislike this book, but I couldn't quite like it either. It had a lot of elements that were interesting, but the overall story was just so unrelentingly sad and hopeless that I kept getting distracted by other books while reading it.
( )

Trollope's first novel, and nowhere near the level of his later works, but worth a read nonetheless for the seeds of what's to come. ( )

Took an age to read, though no fault of the book. A superb descriptive writer on his first novel. Trollope masters Irish dialect and I suspect this is a result of his long association with the Irish Post Office. (Imagine today, combining the roles of senior Post official and the writing of novels; you'd be admonished by the bureaucracy and forced to choose).

This is a desperate story of dispossession in 1830's Ireland. The vindictive administration of Ireland produced desperate insecurity among tenant farmer and in this case, the landholder. Unjust rule produces illegal behaviour.

Read this book; you'll be better off for having done so.

This was much grimmer than I ever expected it to be. It was uneven, there was a great deal of inside Ireland stuff that I simply did not understand but the main plot was straightforward and took an extremely tragic turn that I didn't expect. As is often with Trollopse, it was hard to feel total sympathy with the characters, even the tragic figure of Thaddy, Femmy even less so. My enjoyment was also slightly marred by some dreadful attempts at Irish Accents by a few LibriVox readers.