It starts with almost nothing. A throwaway anecdote from a friend about the BSE crisis; about the late-nineties when the cows – and the country – were going mad. You store it away, but already the idea is growing. Characters. A plot. Some ancient folktales. A murder, maybe, in the midst of it all. Next thing you’re researching – libraries and archives, newspapers and tomes – then it’s off to the farms to look at the cattle; to get the …
Blog Posts
The Temple House Vanishing is a dark and, I hope, atmospheric tale of desire set in a convent school in the early 1990s. The story emerged from a kind of …
Many years ago, my mother met Maeve Binchy at an event and they got on like a house on fire: two Dalkey women with a lot in common. From then …
Greetings! The German playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote that he carried a brick on his shoulder in order that the world would know what his house was like. If I …
Even though I spend so much of my time using many words in endless sentences to pitch my favourite books to people, it’s quite easy to catch my interest when …
It’s a wonderful gift to be able to put the past behind us and get on with our daily concerns. One minute we fear for our lives, the next we’re …
While I was writing my previous post on my favourite books of 2019, I accidentally expanded into an entirely separate article: the most important books for Irish people and Irish …
My little brother and his pals would play Cowboys and Indians for hours at a time. They’d point an imaginary gun at the unfortunate lad who drew the short straw …
My childhood home was littered with books on every available surface. They were stacked in wobbly piles on the floor, and two deep on the few makeshift shelves that threatened …
What are end papers, you ask? In making a hardback book, the block of printed pages is attached to the boards of the cover by glueing a folded sheet of …
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