Annie Gallagher is a storyteller raised by a storyteller. Her passion for language comes from her grandfather Eoin, who raises her on poems and songs from his home country of Ireland. This storytelling helps Eoin stay connected to his native country and passes his culture onto Annie. Storytelling here is an exchange that brings people closer together, crossing generational divides. The novel complicates this seemingly linear transaction, however, when, in 1921, Annie recites the same poems and songs for child Eoin. This makes storytelling the foundation of Eoin and Annie’s love for one another, but the novel’s muted science fiction element of time travel also means that the storytelling is a closed loop—Annie learns the stories from Eoin, who learned them from Annie; rather than a way of passing history forward, the novel stumbles into a time loop paradox.

Stories also preserve newly built relationships. When Annie needs to tell Thomas that she came from the future through Lough Gill without losing his trust in her, she builds a bridge between reality and the impossible by connecting her experiences with folklore about Niamh and Oisín, who kept their love for each other though Niamh had an outlandish story about the origins.