The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him — although that certainly helped — it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. «The Gathering» is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.