Evening Class

Evening Class is a novel by the Irish writer Maeve Binchy, published in 1996 and set in Dublin.

The class is the idea of Aidan Dunne, a teacher whose own career has stalled, and the teacher he finds is Nora O'Donoghue, known to everyone as Signora, who spent years in Italy and keeps her reasons for coming back to herself. The students arrive with separate problems: a young woman who wants a life other than the one her family has planned for her, a man who earns his living on the wrong side of the law, a woman in a marriage she cannot talk about, and others with quieter difficulties. Binchy gives each of them a chapter in turn, so the reader sees the class from every seat in the room, and she moves between Dublin and the trip the group takes to Italy at the end of the year.

The book's subject is the idea that one commitment made casually can change several lives, and its tone stays light while the problems it describes are serious.