Cathy Kelly

News Story

Hello and welcome to September - and welcome to both Homecoming and Golden Square

Posted on 01 Sep 2010

I know that sounds a bit mad but after a year of writing Homecoming, I feel as if Golden Square, where the novel is set, is a real place. I did actually make the locale up because it’s easier and much more fun to make places up, and saves the anxiety of worrying if the butcher’s shop is on the right hand side or the left hand side of Main Street. I would wake up in the night worrying over something like that. But with my fictional Victorian square in Dublin, I can merrily invent things left, right and centre.

 
When I started writing, I had an idea of a woman who’d left Ireland seventy years before with nothing more than a suitcase and her mother’s handwritten recipe book. The recipe book is also a diary of life in 1920s Ireland when the people were poor in monetary ways but rich in other ways.
 
That woman in my mind turned into Eleanor Levine, a renowned psychoanalyst who comes back to Ireland and rents an apartment in Golden Square, where she sits in her window and watches what goes on around her.
 
She meets lovely young actress Megan Bouchier who’s been wildly successful and is a rising young star – until she has a disastrous affair with a married co-star and comes back to Golden Square to hide.
 
From her window, Eleanor sees the darkly beautiful Rae, an older woman who dispenses tea and sympathy from Titania’s Tearooms, but hides a secret behind her good works. In the apartment above Eleanor lives big-hearted teacher, Connie O’Callaghan, who has given up on love. She’s cheerfully approaching forty and besides, why does no man ever match up to the heroes in her beloved romantic novels?
 
Of course, nothing is as it seems… I love writing novels where nothing is as it seems. It was marvellous to write and I hope you enjoy it, fingers crossed!
 
Digg This+ | Del.icio.us+ | Stumble+ | Facebook+ | Email This+
News Headlines

For me, being a mother is the most important part of my life. In Mozambique, I met mothers who face problems that I daren't imagine. HIV-positive mothers desperately trying to get their beloved HIV-positive kids on the life-saving anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) that can mean the difference between life and death.

More >>