---
product_id: 46702812
title: "Molly Sweeney"
brand: "brian friel"
price: "€ 24.17"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 6
url: https://www.desertcart.nl/products/46702812-molly-sweeney
store_origin: NL
region: Netherlands
---

# Molly Sweeney

**Brand:** brian friel
**Price:** € 24.17
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Molly Sweeney by brian friel
- **How much does it cost?** € 24.17 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.nl](https://www.desertcart.nl/products/46702812-molly-sweeney)

## Best For

- brian friel enthusiasts

## Why This Product

- Trusted brian friel brand quality
- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Description

Molly Sweeney

## Images

![Molly Sweeney - Image 1](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41BYMNZBS3L.jpg)
![Molly Sweeney - Image 2](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/316AJD5fv5L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Great story
  

*by K***E on Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2013*

This is an amazing work that tells a story through three different monologues. Brian Friel is a gifted playwright and this is one of his best.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Like I was seeing the play all over agian!
  

*by K***S on Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2011*

I saw this play one evening & when I got home, I ordered this book! It was as if I were watching the play all over again! The book was in GREAT condition! Thanks you!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    SOMETIMES A GIFT DOESN'T WORK
  

*by D***R on Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2009*

Molly Sweeney is a play adapted from the narrative of neuroscientist Oliver Sacks.In an exceptional string of books, Sacks has brought us a series of compelling stories about various kinds of neurological catastrophe. A painter loses all perception of colors. The world appears to him in obscene shades of gray-white. He can, as a result, no longer paint or even embrace his wife because she appears loathsome to him.  Patients suffer pains, or itches, from limbs that were amputated long ago. A miracle drug reverses the comas of patients suffering from meningitis, restoring them to full vitality. But the medication loses effectiveness. They retreat into permanent sleep again. (The story was made into the movie Awakenings, with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams.) A man retains his ability to reason but loses any capacity to distinguish between the objects in front of him: a hat and a person are identical to him. (This story, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," was made into an opera, performed in San Francisco ten years ago.)The logic of the marriage between Sacks, a scientist (though also a humanist) and Brian Friel, Ireland's greatest living playwright, is not apparent at first sight. But it's a marriage made in heaven. Because ...  both of them write about the same thing, which is loss and isolation.There is a blind woman. Her name is Molly. Molly Sweeney. She's forty-one years old. For more than forty years, she has survived, even thrived, as a woman without sight.  She has a job -she's a massage therapist in a local spa--and a husband -she's two years married. But she doesn't see, beyond shadows and vague movement at the periphery of her vision.There is her husband. His name is Frank. Frank's a dreamer, but not one whose projects you want to invest in. His enthusiasms are short-lived and ill conceived: he imports Iranian goats into the blustery winter of County Mayo and the sheep end up living six months out of twelve inside his house to avoid the cold and never yield milk at all. He's excited about importing African killer bees and shepherding a convoy through Ethiopia. One of his enthusiasms is restoring his wife, Molly's, sight. Whether she wants it or not.There is a doctor. His name is Rice. Patrick Rice. He was once a bright light, a "meteor" in his chosen profession of eye surgeon.  Then his wife ran away with his closest friend and he found solace in a bottle. Now he's a second-rate hack in a provincial hospital in Donegal. Molly is his passport back to respectability. If he can restore her sight ....Frank pushes, Rice pulls, Molly acquiesces without knowing what she's getting herself into. The operation works. Her sight is restored, not perfect but more than she's ever known.And her world falls apart. Molly knew how to negotiate her old world of tactile evidence. She'd mastered it, was comfortable and fluent in it.  Now she must relearn the world -her husband Frank, a relentless but inept autodidact says, she must learn "new engrams." All her old knowledge and competence is shut away from her; the new world is a blooming confusion, to paraphrase William James. It's not only confusing, it's ugly. Learning to maneuver in the world of the sighted after forty years blind is hard work. Molly moves from being a highly competent human being who didn't perceive her handicap as a liability to one who can't compete in the sighted world because she is forty years behind the curve.From there on, it's downhill in this poignant, thoughtful, reflective and even occasionally funny play about the human cost of change -in Molly's case, the loss of competence and exile from her past memory. Brian Friel is a master wordsmith who has never written about a more serious theme than the one in Molly Sweeney.

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*Product available on Desertcart Netherlands*
*Store origin: NL*
*Last updated: 2026-02-20*