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 in 2020 while researching ideas for my next novel. I was reading about evacuees during the second world war when I came across an account of ‘sea evacuees’ – children who were evacuated overseas. The account included information about an evacuee ship, SS City of Benares, which was torpedoed in …
Category: Writing
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 …
Service is a story about the abuse of power, set in a buzzy, high-end Dublin restaurant at the height of the boom. It’s told from three perspectives – waitress Hannah …
I had a single recurrent idea for How to Build a Boat for many years––to write a story about a boy who was starting secondary school. But it took me …
It’s that time of the year once again! It means only one thing for our bookseller, Karina, from our Rathmines shop: the annual #ReadIrishWomenChallenge23, and we at Dubray are delighted …
As early as 2016 I knew I wanted to write the next stage of Nella’s story, continuing where I left off from the last scene in The Miniaturist, but I …
My fiction debut, The Amusements, is a novel of interconnected stories set in the seaside town of Tramore – a place I know well because my family are from Waterford. With the …
The strange thing about summer jobs is that we often take them at a time in our lives when we are waiting for ‘real life’ to begin. When I was …
Short stories are the subject of so much myth and mysticism that for a long time, I was afraid to try writing them. So when I was struck with a …
I’m not alone in being hugely excited by news that we can expect yet another Lucy Barton book. Coming late to My Name is Lucy Barton, I remember being immediately …
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