Sue Leonard

Aoife Abbey has always wanted to be a doctor – it was a decision she took as a small child growing up in Dublin, but until she entered medical school in Warwick, and went on to […]

Reading The Narrow Land – a novel set in post-war Cape Cod – is like experiencing the work of Scott F. Fitzgerald. There’s that same atmospheric sense of long hot summers, with people extracting as much […]

It’s twelve years since I interviewed Tana French for her first crime book, the multi-prize winning, Into The Woods, and we’ve not met since. This, in itself, is unusual, since the publishing scene in Dublin is […]

Patricia and I meet in The Clayton Hotel in Dublin. She’s spent the night there after a book club event but didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. The reason? Back in Mullingar, her daughter was […]

When John Cole arrives at a former Northern Irish military aerodrome to identify a woman’s body, old secrets start to surface. But what is the connection with Hooper, a black serviceman who hung in World War […]

Back in August 1882, a gang of men entered a tiny homestead in Maamtrasna, County Galway, and murdered five of the occupants. John Joyce, his wife Bridget, mother Margaret, son Michael and daughter Peggy, who died […]

Back in 2000, Billy O’Callaghan visited Coney Island. He was only there for an afternoon – whilst on a two-week whistle-stop tour of Boston and New York – but he loved the island for its relative […]

Lesley Pearce’s life reads like one of her novels. Left motherless at three, she ended up in a Victorian style orphanage, to be rescued, three years later, by a stepmother who was then cold towards her. […]

Sweet Home. By Wendy Erskine. The Stinging Fly.  There’s been some impressive writing to come out of Northern Ireland in recent years, and the latest, a collection of stories published by The Stinging Fly, focuses on […]

Hazel Gaynor has long been fascinated with Grace Darling, the Northumbrian heroine who, in 1828, risked her life to rescue the survivors of a shipwreck. She learned about her in primary school. “Grace’s story had everything,” […]

Notes to Self. Emilie Pine. Tramp Press.   The opening essay in Emilie Pine’s excellent collection, takes us to Corfu, where Emilie and her sister discover the inadequacies of the Greek health system. Their father’s liver, abused […]

Five years ago, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s husband died after a short illness. An internationally renowned folklorist, Bo Almqvist, who was 20 years Éilís’s senior, had been, simply, the love of her life. His death left her […]