Said the Dead is a book that was born in the archive. It grew from hundreds of hours spent studying a series of casebooks that had been rescued from the cellars of a derelict hospital nearby. By the time I happened to find these books in the archive, they were over a century old and incredibly fragile, their pages brittle and crumbling – but inside, another world was alive. I began with casebooks from the 1890s and slowly read my way towards the 1920s. Many of the books were printed with the name of the institution, ‘Cork District Lunatic Asylum’, a title I could never get used to, always flinching at the word ‘lunatic’, so abrasive to the …
Category: Irish Fiction
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 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 …
Garrett Carr on help he received from old fishermen when writing The Boy from the Sea. The Boy from the Sea unfolds over twenty years and is about a fishing …
I have always been drawn to untold stories. Perhaps this instinct stems from the immigrant experience, having been brought up by Irish parents living in England, who then migrated back …
Caoilinn Hughes’ new novel explores the bonds of sisterhood and the ways those bonds can be tested. Read on… The novel follows four Irish sisters, all in their thirties, who …
The unknowables of the pandemic arrested my writing for a bit. I was sitting at my desk in 2020, worried about my sick father, unable to cross the country to …
Here is a fantastic piece by Sinéad Gleeson for her fiction debut, Hagstone. Taking readers to the darker side of human nature and the mysteries of faith and the natural …
It’s a heat-wave summer in the small West of Ireland village of Ardnakelty. Cal Hooper, who took early retirement from the Chicago police force and moved there looking for peace, …
Anne Doyle tells us about her new new read, Tales of the Otherworld. Ghosts have always been a part of my life. This isn’t something I acknowledge easily, nor is …
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