There's blood coursing through the sentences of Nuala O'Faolain's "My Dream of You." Whatever flaws can be charged to this big, messy, imperfect and enthralling novel -- a shadow plot that is at times too oblique or too obvious, secondary characters who sometimes verge on the "colorful," a first novelist's tendency to spell out her meanings rather than trust the reader to discover them, the occasional conflict between commercial and literary impulses -- it is never less than alive. "My Dream of You" draws you in and stirs you up. With the emotional savagery that seems the special province of Irish writers, O'Faolain lays her protagonist bare and puts you right into her consciousness. You feel this book in your flesh.

Admirers of O'Faolain's bestselling memoir "Are You Somebody?" may be disappointed to find that some of its material has been loosely reworked for the novel. "My Dream of You" doesn't feel recycled, though, for the simple reason that it's a bigger book, a more ambitious one. It doesn't have the control or the concision of that picaresque memoir. And that's exactly as it should be. The book is about the unruly, inconvenient persistence of passion as played out on the landscape of the unruly and inconvenient middle-aged body. Neither of those subjects lends itself to a pretty, minimalist polish. O'Faolain is writing here about the emotional life of one woman, but she goes down so deep that the subject has an improbable heft. She's a long way from the mastery of her countrywoman Edna O'Brien, but she displays something of O'Brien's reckless courage at plunging into the whorls of love.

The heroine, Kathleen de Burca, is a travel writer nearing 50, an Irishwoman living in London, who has winnowed down her existence to the co-workers in her tiny office, her meticulous, fussing boss, Alex, and particularly her fellow writer, Jimmy, a gay American, an expat like herself and something of a soul mate. Moving from the cocoon of her dark basement flat to her job, she's a perpetual tourist in life. As the book opens, Jimmy suddenly dies and Kathleen is shocked into realizing how long she has coasted comfortably. Announcing her retirement from travel writing, Kathleen goes back to Ireland for the first time in 30 years with the idea of researching the real story behind a famous love affair -- between an English landlord's wife and her Irish servant -- that occurred during the famine.

What follows is, of course, about Kathleen confronting her own heritage and learning to open herself to life again. But O'Faolain is such a full-hearted and full-bodied writer that it doesn't feel like too-familiar territory. She has an unexpected way of complicating the issues she raises. Many of the best passages deal with Kathleen's affair with a man she meets on her holiday, an Irishman a few years her elder, whose adoration helps her reconcile the sexual desire she has never ceased to feel with her own body, which is settling into the unwanted folds and expanses of middle age. No writer I know has come up with a scene like the one in which Kathleen examines the red mark left by her lover suckling her breast and remembers how, in order to be more gentle, he took out his dentures beforehand.

O'Faolain cuts through the cant of writing about middle age, which tends to insist only on either the comfort or the decay. And she does the same with old age. In one remarkable passage, an elderly librarian she befriends during her research says, of John Bayley's book about his wife, Iris Murdoch, "I read her husband's book about caring for her in her declining years. I must say I envied her both the Alzheimer's and the caring husband until I realized that if she had the one she didn't know she has the other." When Kathleen tells her that she's the first person she ever met who envied someone with Alzheimer's, the woman responds, "Oh no, Miss de Burca ... I think any reasonable person would envy those who lose their memory as they approach the end."

The memories that Kathleen confronts of her troubled relationship with her father are so painful that the prospect of losing them does seem like a blessing. But O'Faolain doesn't offer Kathleen that easy an out. In a way, "My Dream of You" springs from the afterword to O'Faolain's memoir, where she talks about letting go of self-pity. In the end, Kathleen sees her pain balanced by the pain of the other people around her. The result is a book that's both intimate and remarkably un-self-centered, a tough-minded and passionate tribute to the ache that tells you you're alive.

-- Charles Taylor

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"