On a warm, wine-and-weed-filled July night in the US, a homeless man comes to the door of James's Boston apartment. Walter has a sunburnt face, smells like dry wood and assures James that there is an old lady lying in the middle of his street. But when James goes to look there's nobody to be seen. He begins to question Walter's veracity and what else this stranger will bring into his life.
Walter's arrival and the request he makes stir up a life that James thought he'd left behind on the small Tipperary farm where he grew up as one of five children. Learning that Walter has been sent on this errand by Kevin Lyons, the wayward son of a neighbouring builder he knew long ago, James is thrown even further back into his past, to the community that always knew him as 'Jimmy' and the summer evenings when he and Kevin, older by a few years, used to go down to the river and what they did there. Thinking back, he slowly starts to unearth the mysteries of that time: what Kevin's father was really up to in the shed in the yard, what happened to Aunt Tess, who went away to become a nurse in Dublin, and whether, after all these years, people like Kevin ever really change.
The Visitors is a captivating story of the interweaving fates of two families, of the gap between childhood and the adult world, and of the shocking revelations that come with crossing the divide.
