Peig McManus shares an extract from her memoir, I Will Be Good Mam said it was cold the day she brought me home to our tenement room on North King Street in Dublin 7. Gran, my dad’s mother, had the fire lighting. Mam sat in front of it, cradling me on her lap, heating her hands to warm my cold feet. Very soon I got the hang of things and stretched out my tiny feet o meet her warmed hands. …
Category: World War Two
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 …
Books tend to form slowly for me. Usually there’s a novel or two in various states of progress, and particularly early on, and then again between drafts, I’ll bounce between …
While the Soviet Union was governed by a single communist party for sixty-nine years, it was the Stalinist era spanning 1924 to 1953 that were the most memorably brutal. Nobody …
As a toddler, my son was obsessed with Janet & Alan Ahlberg’s Peepo! It’s a day in the life of a baby, but in the background is the London Blitz: …
When I was writing my new novel, Yours Cheerfully, because it is a sequel (to my debut Dear Mrs Bird) and I know my characters and where they are in …
Books are living things. They are primarily vehicles for human stories. They carry our memory in print. At one point, in my new novel – The Pages – a library …
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