When in 1789 Anthony Considine creeps into Mellick town with a stolen horse, he knows what he wants. By the 1850s, through thrift and hard work, his son Honest John has made the Considines a leading Mellick family. In his turn, John's son Anthony builds a fine house in the country for his wife and children. Little does he know that when Denis grows up he will threaten the toil of generations with his love for a peasant girl...Without My Cloak is an enduring portrait of one family's strengths and weaknesses, of matches made and lost for respectability, of the constraints of Catholicism; of divided loyalties, and of individual freedom threatened by the pride of the family name.
