books

My latest book, TOUCHSTONES, will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2012. I’m also working on a novel, The Granddaughter’s Song, set in contemporary inner London and Bosnia in 1992 and 1941. It’s about music, choices, identity and survival.

Touchstones is about my life in Corca Dhuibhne, Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula, the westernmost inhabited place in mainland Europe. National Geographic Magazine calls it ‘the most beautiful place on earth’. I fell in love with it aged seventeen, when I first went there to study the Irish language. Now, thirty years later, I live and work both there and in Bermondsey, an inner-city area in south east London. The contrasts between them are part of what the book’s about.

‘Corca Dhuibhne’ means ‘the territory of the people of the goddess Danu’, the earth-mother of the ancient Celts. Music and memory are part of its heritage. My neighbours there today share a vibrant oral culture, stretching from the myths of Danu and the sea-god, Mannanán Mac Lir, to razor-sharp political comedy, and improvised songs and stories about their rural, internet-savvy community. The ancient festival of Bealtaine’s still celebrated with horse-racing on the beach; and Lughnasa, the feast of the sun-god, Lugh, is marked by pilgrimages up Mount Brandon. And pagan gods and Christian saints are cheerfully remembered together. No-one knows what Mount Brandon was called by the Celts who climbed it at Lughnasa. Its name now celebrates the medieval saint, Brendan The Voyager, whose legendary trip to America was re-created in 1976 by the British explorer Tim Severin, in a boat made of timber and ox-hides. But whoever’s being remembered, the pilgrimage route up Brandon’s still the same. In Corca Dhuibhne, the difference between tens, hundreds and thousands of years hardly seems to matter.

Changeling, my first novel, was written after months in development hell on a well-paid tv drama that never reached the screen. When I emerged, the writer Maeve Binchy, a wise woman and a good friend, sent me this e-mail: NOW SIT DOWN AND WRITE WHAT YOU LIKE. So I did, starting with three things - a teenager’s hatred for her dad’s new baby, a motif from folklore, and an Ordnance Survey map of the area in which the book is set.