[Messud is a novelist. In the favorable review below, in which she discusses the plot and theme of Mother of Pearl, Messud notes Morrissy's focus on Irish society, despair, and "the violent movement between the external and the internal."]

The narrative of an infant stolen from its parents is necessarily a double one, demanding accounts both of one family's loss and of another's joyous gain. But Mother of Pearl, a fine first novel by the Irish writer Mary Morrissy, goes further, acknowledging the triple nature of the tale: two families live through this momentous event and its consequences, but so too does the child caught between them.

Divided into three main sections, Mother of Pearl explores the internal lives of three Irishwomen linked by the theft of a baby. Their conflicts are reflected in those of the unnamed Irish city they inhabit, "a city of tribes, like twins divided at birth. At war, at war with itself." In spite of their differences, the women have in common the bitter narrowing of their horizons. They're condemned to a world of working-class poverty where sex—brutal or voyeuristic or merely failed—provides no relief from isolation, and where the only escape is departure to the New World.

The novel's opening strand, which begins in the late 1940s, follows Irene Rivers, who is plucked from her first job, on the cruise ship Queen Bea, and confined to a tuberculosis sanitarium. Abandoned by her family, she remains at Granitefield long after she is cured, providing sexual favors to the inmates out of a sense of moral obligation.

The man who rescues her, Stanley Godwin, is middle-aged and impotent. To him, Irene "offered what he knew was impossible. New life." To her, he is simply a last chance at life. Yet Irene finds herself imprisoned afresh in Stanley's terraced house on Jericho Street. There she invents a child, the impossible product of a nonexistent sexual union. Once created, this girl—named Pearl—refuses to release Irene's imagination. It is only a matter of time until Irene must make her flesh, which she does by stealing an unattended infant from the city hospital.

Pearl brings happiness to Stanley and Irene both. But Irene is always aware that the intersection of her dreams with reality is precarious; and when, four years later, the police come to reclaim her precious daughter, she is waiting for them.

Ms. Morrissy's gift for the unexpected image allows shafts of light into an otherwise bleak world: when Irene undresses, she hears "the silky chattering of her slip up around her ears", a bus is "a beast driven," with wipers that "clung gamely to its snout." But it is the darker themes—of isolation, secrecy and the search for connection and control—that recur, carefully patterned, through all the sections of the novel.

In the second, Rita Spain, the child's natural mother, is struck by the confluence of her imagined and real lives. In marrying, "she felt both omnipotent and helpless—all she had done was to wish for this." Her child comes too soon, is not wanted; Rita's guilt over the baby's disappearance is overwhelming. She survives by manufacturing an "official version of their lives," which denies the past. When her little girl is returned to her, Rita imposes this official version on Mary (as she renames Pearl): unable to accept the fact that the child taken and the one brought back are the same, Rita separates them, inventing for Mary and her younger sister, Stella, the myth of a stillborn older sibling.

Mary, granted the novel's only first-person voice, grows up haunted by the lingering presence of this shadowy girl, whom she calls Jewel. Her father dead, her younger sister and her mother locked in a sympathy that excludes her, Mary finds in Jewel her only companion; but it is Jewel who prompts her to ruin her own life.

The novel is shot through with instances, both physical and metaphorical, of invasion, of the violent movement between the external and the internal. Its complex imagery of boats, rivers and the sea seems to promise pain and death as readily as escape. The Queen Bea floats into view on a number of occasions, the bearer of unattainable dreams; but it comes as no surprise to learn that she eventually "went down with all aboard."

Dense, lyrical and often startlingly written, Ms. Morrissy's various narratives evoke with a relentless force the stifling enclosure of her characters' lives. The effect is powerful, uncompromising, but not easily likable. The obscure but ever-present menace of their torn society, the airless despair of the houses and streets they inhabit, and the loveless isolation of their circumstances give rise to the women's elaborate—and dangerous—fantasies of salvation. Ms. Morrissy allows them few moments of pleasure, and these are hard-won and short-lived. When one of the novel's minor characters, a young man named Michael Carpenter, accidentally hangs himself while masturbating, it seems, next to these women's experiences, an almost enviable fate; at least he "had the biggest orgasm of his life."