Saying goodbye has never been easy for me. I was very much reminded of that while writing ‘Don’t Look Back in Ongar’, the 24th and FINAL novel in the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series. I’ve been writing these books for the greater part of my adult life and I know I’m going to miss having The Rossmeister General’s idiot voice inside my head for most of my working day.
As you can probably imagine, this was the toughest book in the series to write and I cried pretty much every day of the final six weeks working on it. The characters I created in these pages really have lived in my head for a quarter of a century and I think about Sorcha and Charles and Fionnuala and Hennessy and Ronan and Honor and dear old Buckets of Blood every day – things they might do, lines they might say, in some future Ross book. So it was very emotional writing this story, knowing that, one by one, I was moving all these characters off the stage forever. I just hope I’ve given each character a fitting ending.
As much as I’ll miss writing these books, I’ll also miss the booksellers I’ve met since the very first, self-published Ross book appeared in January 2000 out of the boot of my twelve-year-old Nissan Micra. One of the happy by-products of writing a book in a small, printed-word-loving country like Ireland is that you end up on first-name terms with dozens and dozens of booksellers. I’ve met some brilliant people in Dubray over the years. And when I think about what I’ll most miss about writing the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly books, it’s sitting in the office above the shop on the main street in Bray in late August, signing two- or three-thousand copies of the latest book and shooting the breeze with the staff, who feel like old friends to me now.
Thank you so much for everything, Dubray Books, your staff and your customers. As Ross might say, “You’ve been total focking ledges!”
You can now find Don’t Look Back in Ongar in our shops and online.
