I began my writing life with novels and plays and had success with three books, Priest, The Trouble with Sarah Gullion, and Bird in the Snow, and 6 plays produced by the Abbey Theatre. But my stories were always close to my lived experience and after a while I realised that memoir was my new fiction; memoir is not biography; it’s a selection of memories that one relishes, and from which one can create a kind of true fiction. A …
Category: Fiction
As a crime writer and a huge crime reader, I love nothing more than discovering new authors and hearing about how my favourite writers put a book together – where …
By John Banville I have a thing against Venice. In fact, I have a number of things against Venice. The avarice. The tourists. The smells. Some years ago I was …
The art of discovering a favourite book by Jessica Harrison, Publishing Director of Penguin Classics. How do you choose a favourite book? Is it the novel you discovered as a …
Caoimhe in our Cork store reflects on the books that have shaped her… In May 2015, I was 15 years old and although I did not yet recognize my own …
Memories collide to create the inspiration for The Museum of Lost Umbrellas Back in 2020 I woke up one morning with a dream still swimming in my head: an isolated …
Usually when asked where my inspiration comes from, I tend to say that it begins with character. But The Night I Killed Him started with a location – specifically the …
I think that anybody who has ever worked in a shop has been granted a perspective on the world that is unique. A secret code understood only by those of …
It Should Have Been You is about a woman named Susan who writes a mean, gossipy message to her sisters all about a neighbour, Celeste, who gets on her nerves. …
The Kindness of Strangers. In an increasingly volatile world, I’ve been thinking about kindness. What does it mean? And why is it important. My new novel, Two Kinds of Stranger, …
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