‘The Ballroom Café’ features heady brew of hate and scandal

Irish Examiner journalist Ann O’Loughlin last night launched her debut novel based on the forced adoption of Irish children in institutions to the US.

Set at the height of the recession in Ireland in a crumbling mansion, The Ballroom Café focuses on two elderly sisters, Ella and Roberta O’Callaghan, who live alone with their secrets, memories, and mutual hatred. When they are threatened with bankruptcy, Ella converts the mansion’s old ballroom into a café.

But Ella finds herself reliving painful memories when Debbie, an American woman searching for her birth mother, begins working at the café. As the local convent comes under scrutiny, the O’Callaghan sisters find themselves caught up in an adoption scandal that dates back to the 1960s and spreads all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.