Everything Gran told me about Coolanagh was wrong. Quicksand does not suck, it is not bottomless, it does not have a life of its own. It is a phenomenon, not a substance. Any sand can become 'quick' given the right conditions. It's August in the long, hot summer of 1995 and Jo Devereux can't believe that she hasn't yet returned home to San Francisco, though the time for her to have her baby draws near. How can she still be in Ireland, in this village that she fled 20 year before, in this crumbling shed on the edge of the ocean? Still resisting Rory O'Donovan, her childhood sweetheart, and still excavating their families's entwined and twisted history. Jo has spent months thinking and writing about her great-uncle Barney's death at the hands of Dan O'Donovan -- but now she is brought to consider just who led Dan to his grisly death, to suffocating in Mucknamore's notorious sinking sands. And what questions this raises for Jo about her beloved Granny Peg. Was she really capable of luring a man out there late at night in revenge for the killing of her brother? (Or perhaps for more intimate reasons?) Or was her grandmother, as Jo would like to believe, innocent of all? Combing the family letters and diaries for what has gone unsaid, Jo is unprepared for her reaction to the "War of The Brothers", as the Civil War has come to be known in Ireland. And for the knowledge of how it affected her own life fifty years on. In continuing to excavate astonishing stories about her mother and grandmother, Jo comes to realise the price she, and her people, had to pay for freedom. But what does this mean for her and Rory, as he draws ever closer? Will her mission to redeem the past turn out to be the key to her future? Or is she about to lose out, all over again? BEFORE THE FALL (sequel to AFTER THE RISING) is a sweeping, multigenerational tale set in 1920s and 1990s Ireland and 1980s San Francisco. The second book in Orna's Ross's Irish trilogy, it's a novel for anyone who ever tried to break free.