‘Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind,’ the first novel from Deirdre Shanahan, is the hauntingly moving story of Eva, a former Irish traveller who returns to Ireland with her son Torin to stay with her father and secretively find Caitlin, the daughter she abandoned there years before. Torin and Caitlin meet and we see their entangled relationship with Caitlin, and the consequences when they discover their true connection. They have to negotiate out of their mother’s troubled past. The novel explores the tensions around family and what it means, escape and flight, urban and rural life and the compromises we have to make to survive and love.