The truth is, each of these women is praying for a miracle. Each of these women hope that someone or something will fix their w

Many Thanks to Tracy Fenton at Compulsive Readers and Zaffre Books for inviting us on this Blog Tour.Loved loved loved it! As always an amazing story with real life issues, read it in 3 days couldn't put it down going to work was a bit of inconvenience lol can't wait for the next one, thanks Anna'

Miso . . . gynist?” Vadik said. The word sounded vaguely familiar, but he wasn’t sure what it meant. Despite praying, to all the saints she can think of, for one small miracle to help her keep her baby, life in Catholic Ireland in the '70s was never going to make that easy. The truth is, each of these women is praying for a miracle. Each of these women hope that someone or something will fix their world for them and give them the one thing they truly want, but will any of them receive a miracle from above or will they find it within themselves? They were almost out the door when Vadik remembered his book. “Cinema 1” was in his suitcase upstairs. “Can I borrow a book?” he asked. We also meet Catherine in 1976, who as a fifteen year old girl meets local heartthrob and rich kid Justin, falls madly in love and gets pregnant. Pregnant at 15 in Ireland 1976? I think we know where this is going.You will be gripped by both stories and wonder where the book is going ... but it gets better and better.' I understand what you mean, but I disagree. The guy is expressing what he feels in the moment. He may not feel the same way afterward, but that doesn’t mean he’s not sincere in that precise moment.” teenager Catherine is brought up on a rural Irish pig farm. She knows that there are bigger, better things out there in the world, but she has no idea how she will ever be able to escape the simplicity and tedium of farm life. However, she is sure in the knowledge that her parents and brothers love her. They are salt of the earth people – they work the land, regardless of the hardships it brings, and they attend church. This is their life and they don’t waver from it. Until Catherine falls in love with a boy who is from a well-respected, well-to-do family. In her naivete, she believes this is her key to freedom that will allow her to escape her future on the pig farm. But when she falls pregnant, she discovers how very wrong she is.

The other timeline is the story of Catherine, a teenager in 1976, the daughter of a pig farmer in a rural village who falls pregnant bringing shame onto her family. Shunned by her boyfriend, she is sent to a Mother and Baby Home run by sadistic nuns. The abuse Catherine endures at the hands of the “sisters” is abhorrent, however we now know that these homes are based on FACT and the author has written about this barbaric time in Ireland without sugar coating anything. In 2010, Caroline, Nancy, Janet and Ronnie, things are very different. Caroline and husband Dave have agreed the toll of IVF is too much and the last attempt was the very last one. Except Caroline is still holding out for the tiniest miracle that Dave will change his mind... The book has a dual timeline - we meet Caroline in 2010, married to Dave and struggling with infertility. She wants to try one last round of IVF but he doesn’t. She attends a infertility support group and we meet some of the women in the group on their own difficult journeys (Janet, Natalie and Ronnie). Mixing sacred and profane verses, "Hallelujah" is about the folly of trying to live a sanctified life in a fallen, imperfect world. The song offers biblical wisdom, sexual healing and haunted, inspired solitude. The singer looks for beauty in every syllable, every stroke of sex, every note that is offered up to the Lord–to G-d, as Cohen writes–but he also realizes, at least implicitly, that it is his lust, his flaws, that cause a stupendous, epic fall. The only version of "Hallelujah" as sublime as Cohen’s is one performed by Bob Dylan in 1988 in Montreal. (It’s available online.) Dylan’s voice, like Cohen’s, is gravelly, and when he sings "there’s a blaze of light in every word," you can glimpse the illumination amid the haze. When Dylan first heard the song, along with the rest of Various Positions, he said that Cohen’s songs were starting to sound more like prayers. It's such a gorgeous examination of grief while also being honest, hilarious and totally relatable. I LOVED this book!' Fionnuala Kearney, author of The Book of Love

Rachel shook her head with such force that one of her braids came undone and fine wisps of brown hair flew up and down.

Like a hug from a best friend after a heartbreaking ordeal. It is everything I expected and so much more.In 1976, sixteen year old Catherine is pregnant. This may be the 70s, where here in the UK, things were changing for the better for women, but Catherine is Irish and lives in deepest rural Ireland. Daughter of a pig farmer, in love with a boy from a well-to-do family, and desperate. Her family are shamed and before she knows it, she has been whisked away, out of sight from prying eyes and loose tongues. The overriding theme in Waiting for the Miracle is infertility, but in addition to this, secondary themes also include the treatment meted out to unmarried mothers in Ireland in the not too distant past, friendship, resilience, family values and the fact that sometimes we do get to choose and create our own families. This story gets under your skin, mostly because we know these stories are real. It's no secret that so many girls/young women found themselves in similar situations. We hear stories all the time from those who spent a lifetime searching for their 'lost children'.