Growing up without a sense of a shared identity or community can be profoundly isolating and lonely. This book arose from that disconnect, fuelled by a deep desire to connect with fellow members of the queer Irish community. Ten years ago in 2014, I began to research Ireland’s queer history and I was amazed to uncover the legacy of individuals who had worked tirelessly to pave the way for liberation and celebration within our community. As my research began, I was really surprised to find out that Ireland was one of the first countries in the world to have a gay boyband, that Hollywood royalty ..read more

Fiona McPhillips shares a few words on a forthcoming book, When We Were Silent. Dubray Grafton Street is where it all began. I launched my first nonfiction book there in 2008 and will return to celebrate the publication of my debut novel, When We Were Silent, on the 3rd of May. It’s a thriller set in 1980s Dublin that follows teenager Lou Manson when she enrols at the elite Highfield Manor to try and expose the school’s dark secret. This time around, the journey to publication began in 2020 when I had the good fortune to read Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. I took to heart her advice to write abou ..read more

I’m not sure if this anecdote is true or not but a fellow Irish writer once told me that Chekhov would prepare to pen a new short story by writing a separate short story about each of his characters. This method sounds very labour intensive and a bit of a head melt, like the literary version of a Russian doll. Chekhov was nothing if not an overachiever. I have never really been a fan. Is there a more shameful confession for a short story writer to make? Yet when I came to write my last novel The Raptures, Chekhov’s purported method felt oddly appealing. I was writing a novel where eleven young ..read more

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 world. I’ve always been a little obsessed by remote places. Being from a large island like Ireland means we have a collective fascination with isolated communities. The central character in Hagstone is Nell, an artist who lives very much on her own terms, and her practice is rooted in the land and mythology. Her work is partly inspired by the secluded setting and eerie sound that only some islanders can hear.  On the othe ..read more

Rebecca Ivory author of Free Therapy tells us how she came about to write her debut collection of stories. I wrote almost half of this book while living in Alberta, a province in Canada. At the time, the writer Tom Morris, who was my mentor, gave me a weekly writing prompt, and from these prompts sprouted the first draft of four short stories. The final versions eventually revealed themselves, sometimes months later. In some cases, it took two years, and dozens of drafts for them to feel like they were finished, or at least as finished as they were ever going to be with me as the author. I lik ..read more

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, has found it: he’s built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and the two of them are gradually turning half-feral teenager Trey Reddy into a good kid going good places. But then Trey’s absent father comes home, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland. His arrival threatens the delicate balance the three of them have built. Cal and Lena would do whatever it takes to protect ..read more

Barcelona by Mary Costello is a captivating short story collection from award-winning novelist exploring love, loss and the turbulent lives of ordinary people. The stories in this collection were written over ten years. My first collection of stories, The China Factory, was published in 2012, followed by two novels, Academy Street (2014) and The River Capture (2019). Some of these stories have their origins in places I visited, or in something someone told me. I was in Barcelona only once, at Easter. Certain street sights—the religious processions, the birds locked up ..read more

When my debut novel Breaking Point came out, I quickly wrote a second novel. But after sending the draft to my editor, I realised a different story had been percolating all the while. This story quickly took over as the one I really wanted to tell, and became my second novel, In Her Place. The story came from two separate ideas that I had been simmering on the backburner for what I thought would be two separate novels. One was inspired by my mother, who developed early onset Alzheimer’s when she was just 58. During the time she was ill, I used to fantasise about finding a miracle cure for her ..read more

We are delighted to have a piece by Anna Fitzgerald for Girl in the Making. This coming-of-age tale is about a gentle girl called Jean Kennedy growing up in suburban Dublin in the 1970s and ’80s alongside her mother, her Aunty Ida, and her little brother Baby John F. She shares a few words below. I grew up in an Ireland that now seems almost a foreign country. Wives were for the handling of husbands, their ambitions subject to men’s authority and men’s entitlement; and an unmarried woman was seen as a comical, unfulfilled figure. When I started writing the novel that became Girl in the Making ..read more

Claire Wills shares a piece with us on her new read Missing Persons or My Grandmother’s Secret. You know that feeling that there’s something you are not in on? We all know it. It’s a condition of growing up. The belief that one day the things that have been kept secret from you – secrets of sex, but also money, work, all the things that are really going on – are going to be revealed. In my case, growing up half-Irish in England – in Croydon to be precise, in the 1960s and 70s – there were more particular secrets, involving cousins who were being kept hidden, and uncles we never saw. It was a s ..read more