Sometime in the late 1990s, I read Herman Hesse’s 1927 novel Steppenwolf and was awed by a passage that prophesied the great destruction coming to Europe. Harry Haller, that book’s antihero, observed with a cold eye the public unrest in Germany, the fragmentation of its politics, the racism and xenophobia that was parading openly on the streets. In youthful fancy, I wondered about the thrill of being alive during such times. The 1990s, after all, seemed hopelessly dull, and political …
Category: Contemporary Fiction
For more than three decades I’ve been obsessed with Anne Lister, the gender-nonconforming Yorkshire landowner and entrepreneur who kept an extraordinarily interesting four-million-word diary with the private bits veiled in …
My first inklings of the story which would become Ordinary Human Failings were from a non-fiction book by the great Scottish writer Gordon Burn. In his definitive account of Peter …
In April 2020, a few months after the publication of my novel Dear Edward, I started a new book. Part of the reason I write is to make sense of …
I was settling down to write my fifth novel – what would become The Lodgers – just as Russia was invading Ukraine. What was happening on the other side of …
I was eight years old, visiting my Dublin cousins. It was always a big thing for myself and my sister to be in the big smoke – all the things …
Caroline O’Donoghue shares some her inspiration behind The Rachel Incident… James and Rachel are two 20-somethings who meet working at a bookshop in 2010. I set it in a bookshop …
I’m often asked where I get the ideas for my books, and the answer is different every time. The Last Lifeboat began with a nugget of history I discovered back …
Naoise Dolan tells us about her new read, The Happy Couple. Astrology is a harsh mistress, yet I’m ever in her thrall. As an Aries, I am constantly told that …
Nearly fifteen years ago, a man was found dead on a beach in the north-west of Ireland. Nobody knew who he was or where he had come from. The man …
Recent Comments