Hello everyone, I had to show you the cover of the next instalment in the Harp story! I really like it. It’s another image from Cobh, Queenstown as it used to be called. For those of you with Irish blood somewhere back along the line, this would have been one of the last sights your people would have seen as they set sail for a new life. Music features in this book quite a bit, so you’ll see the manuscript in the top corner and the year is now 1916, a very turbulent time here on our little island. The book is on preorder now, and will be published in the end of May all going well. Just click here to preorder and delivery on publication day: The West’s Awake (geni.us/TheWestsAwake) If you haven’t read my other book set during the Easter Rising, you might enjoy it in preparation for this one. I wrote it a good few years ago now, and the characters in it remain some of my favourites. It’s called Shadow of a Century, and it’s about a young journalist in 2016 who strikes up a friendship with an old Irish lady when she goes to investigate a robbery at her house in New York. The item stolen has no material value as such, but is something very precious and historically significant, and the search for it leads both of them on a journey into the past, to a time when the streets of Dublin were decimated by war as Ireland’s sons and daughters began their final bid for freedom after eight centuries of colonisation. It’s a love story, but it also tells a tale of the many layers of the Irish struggle and how it wasn’t clear cut along social, religious or political lines as you might have thought. Like all conflicts, it was nuanced, and this book tells that story too. You can pick up a copy here :BUY SHADOW OF A CENTURY (mybook.to/JeanGraingerShadow) This new Queenstown book’s title is taken from a song written in the 1830s by Thomas Davis, the Irish revolutionary, called The West’s Asleep. He also wrote the famous anthem, A Nation Once Again, you may be more familiar with that one. In The West’s Asleep, he laments the subjugation of his homeland by England but rouses his fellow countrymen to be heartened when Connaught, the province in the west of Ireland is awakened. ‘The West’s Awake, Sing! Oh Hurrah, let England quake, we’ll watch till death for Erin’s sake.’ It contains many gorgeous lines but my favourite is, ‘I’m sure the great God never planned, for slumbering slaves, a home so grand.’ Here’s a link to the song performed live on an Irish TV show, The West’s Awake (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWdfdsHla7c) Anyway, this new book is Book 2 in The Queenstown Series and is the story of Harp and her mother and the most awful villain I’ve ever written, Ralph Devereaux. Things are heating up in every direction, politically and personally, and they find themselves in serious trouble, and entirely at the mercy of that black hearted scoundrel! I’d love to tell you he gets his comeuppance in the end but…. 🙂 It goes from Queenstown, County Cork to the heart of Irish America in South Boston, back to the war ready streets of Liverpool and back to Dublin. I loved writing it, I hope you’ll look forward to reading it. And a huge thank you to everyone who had bought and reviewed and told their friends about Last Port of Call, it is absolutely flying and I have you all to thank for that. The West’s Awake will be out in May but you can line up your copy now by preordering. Pre-order The West’s Awake (geni.us/TheWestsAwake) Stay safe from the dreaded virus, the end is in sight my friends, Le grá agus buiochas,
Remembering Maeve Binchy
October 25, 2020