A Man Made to Measure

Meet Dolly Devoy, the brash new girl at Dublin’s Jacob’s Biscuit Factory…

An unforgettable Irish saga set over the Easter Uprising and the First World War

Dolly Devoy, a bold young Dubliner, has become very sure of herself since being promoted to work in the office of the local biscuit factory. Too sure of herself.

She should be a lord’s daughter, like Alice Delahunt, to be that confident.

For Alice the path looks smooth, with a glittering marriage to a hero of the Somme. But her husband, Stephen, is no hero to Alice, and she covets another. Her unlikely rival for the love of that man? One Dolly Devoy…

It is an age of great passion and, in Dublin, of seething unrest. Love and war leave no one untouched, and in this story of loss and longing, those who survive are changed for ever.

For readers of Diney Costeloe, Nadine Dorries and Mary Gibson, A Man Made to Measure is an incredibly emotive novel, absorbing and affecting from the get-go.

‘Extremely moving… a splendid, vigorous, warm-hearted novel’ Irish Press

Elaine Crowley was born in Dublin. She left school at fourteen and became an apprentice tailor. She married a soldier, and they lived in Egypt and Germany, before settling down in Port Talbot, Wales. Elaine had six children and numerous grandchildren. Prior to her highly successful writing career she worked as an Avon lady, a dinner lady, and for the personnel department of British Steel. She is perhaps best known for her novels Dreams of Other Days, The Young Wives and A Family Cursed, all written during her latter years. She died in 2011, in Swansea.