Evening Class by Maeve Binchy

Evening Class is a novel set in modern day Dublin, in Maeve's format of writing a chapter from each character's point of view. It starts with the return of Nora, a middle aged Irishwoman who has been living in Italy for many years. She went there because her Italian lover had told her that he could not marry her, that he was engaged to a girl in his home village and was expected to go back home to marry her. Nora followed him and managed to scrape a living teaching English and doing sewing. She waits for her lover to change his mind but instead sees him only occasionally for sex while he rears a family with his wife. Then after 20 years he is killed in a car crash and his wife tells Nora that she should leave the village. She has been shunned by her family in Ireland for having a long standing affair with a married man and does not know what will happen to her back in Dublin. She flies home and manages to find a room to live in a house in a working class estate near the Dublin mountains. She meets with her old friend Brenda, who runs a restaurant and Brenda tells her that she fears that Nora's family may welcome her back but it is because they want someone to look after her elderly mother. She advises her not to give way to their emotional blackmail. Meanwhile Aidan Quinn is a teacher at a school near to where Nora is living. He has 2 grown up daughters and a wife who seems indifferent to him. He had hopes of becoming headmaster of teh school, but is told by another teacher that its not going to happen, that he is not tough enough to manage a school in these hard times. Tony O'Brien, the other teacher, tells him that he himself is going to be headmaster and that AIdan should find another avenue to explore in teaching. He decides to set up Italian evening classes. Tony thinks that it will be hard to get funding for them but he wants to keep Aidan who is a good teacher, and he agrees to help. Nora finds out the rumours and goes to Aidan and offers herself as an evening class teacher who can teach Italian.