Karl Geary
Karl Geary is in his car, in Glasgow, talking to me via zoom. After spending many rackety years in the States, the Dubliner is happily settled in Glasgow. After a lifetime of yearning to be a…
Shane Dunphy
Before I start reading a novel, I turn to the page of Acknowledgments. You can learn a lot from them. Can the writer form a good sentence? Is he/she over fond of exclamation marks? Are they…
Kathleen MacMahon.
Kathleen MacMahon has writing in her blood. As a Granddaughter of the short story writer, Mary Lavin, and niece of the late Caroline Walsh, former Books editor of the Irish Times, whose husband, James Ryan is…
Sam Blake
Sam Blake has always been passionate about words. And she likes nothing more than writing – losing herself in her characters and intricate plots. She’s published eight crime fiction novels since 2016 – many of them…
A Second Life by Dermot Bolger.
New Island: €13.95. Kindle: €6.96. Sean Blake, a press photographer and father of two young children is involved in a near fatal car crash outside the gates of the Botanic Gardens. His heart stops for a…
Claudia Carroll
Claudia Carroll is unlucky in love. She’s had a terrible time on dating sites – never, ever, meeting anyone she clicked with, and when, one day, she read a story of someone’s date from hell, it…
Ally Bunbury.
Ally Bunbury’s earliest memory is of driving round the drawing room on a little cart, smoking a candy cigarette. “I was pretending to be Alexis Carrington,” she says, talking of Joan Collins’s character in the…
Judith Mok
When Judith Mok was fifteen, she became a student at the Royal Conservatoire in the Hague. A gifted singer, she was thrilled to receive a Masterclass from Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, the diva whose voice had filled her…
Anne Booth
When the writer Anne Booth was a child, she wanted to become a priest. As the youngest child of Irish parents, who, having emigrated to England, were strictly practising Catholics, she never rebelled. “I felt…
Andrew Meehan.
Andrew Meehan has recently published his third novel. Set in Heidelberg, it charts an uneasy love affair between a German woman, Ute Pfeiffer, and Seanie Donnellan from Ireland. Both are cautious about love, and being recently…
David Park.
David Park, 68, is the most self-effacing author I have ever come across. He didn’t even call himself a writer until his seventh novel was published back in 2012 – and only then because, faced with…
The Swimmers by Chloe Lane.
Gallic Books London: €13.95. Kindle: €6.15. The Swimmers, by this debut author from New Zealand, takes place over just five days. It’s the Queen’s Birthday Holiday weekend in suburban New Zealand, and Erin is spending the…