Category: Writers Read

Collaboration, Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writers with Artists

Writers Chat 50 (Part 1): Mia Gallagher on “Dubliners”(Marinonibooks: Italy, 2022)

I’m delighted to publish – on Bloomsday! – the first of a Two-Part Writers/Artists Chat about “Dubliners”, by writer Mia Gallagher and artist Margio Sughi.

Mia and Mario, Congratulations on Dubliners (Marinonibooks, Italy: 2022) – a most beautifully produced collaboration between words and visual art, essentially, a capturing of stories of Dubliners from 2018 to 2022 but actually their imagined lives beyond and before these times.  

Cover of Dubliners by Mia Gallagher and Mario Sughi (Green background showing drawings of figures in swimming gear in blue). With kind permission of the authors.

SG: Before we get into the details of the stories and images in this collection – can you talk about your experience of the process of this collaborative work, that dance between both art forms and then again, the re-creation of new stories in the way the prose and images are set out together in the book?

MG: Hey Shauna – thanks a million for having us onto your series and many thanks too for your kind words about the book.

Collaborations, in my experience, succeed on three things. There needs to be resonance between myself and the artist/s I’m collaborating with, a feeling that deep down, we are after something similar. There needs to be enough difference to make for real dialogue. And the third element, possibly the most important, is excellent communication.

Mario has lived in Dublin for over 30 years. He and I are roughly the same age, and we move in similar circles, so I can recognise his places – his Dublins – and his people. There is a congruence between his and my Dubliners but they’re not exactly mappable– which is great for collaboration, it sets up a necessary tension, a dynamic.

Mario’s concept for this book was to place his existing images near my existing texts so a play would happen in the reader/viewer, allowing for new connections and meanings. I write in a montagey way, piecing together meaning as it comes, and it’s always exciting to see how my work can be recontextualised. So that concept also felt right to me on a deep level.

But Mario and I were only the starting points. We worked with a team: curator (Melania Gazzotti), publisher (Antonio Marinoni), translator (Silvana d’Angelo), and designers (Maia and Claude at studio òbelo). This triangulated the collaboration process. With every new person there was more dialogue, more room to refine the vision, add dimension.

In any collaborative project things can go wrong fast. A simple misunderstanding can lead to a shitfest in hours. Factor in different countries and languages and the risk snowballs. But Mario and Antonio were extraordinarily skilful in how they managed the process. This enabled each of us to be involved as much as we wanted – or needed – to.

For example, I’m a book-making hound. I love the process of editing, typesetting, layout – turning a Story into a Thing, and I am very grateful to Mario & Antonio for letting me get stuck into that. However, I can get bogged down in details too, and I’ve always appreciated the person – in this case, Melania – who says ‘Okay, Mia, hands off the wheel, it’s grand’. As long as you’re talking with your collaborative partners, asking questions, listening, making suggestions, being heard, you can figure out anything.

I want to give a special mention to Silvana the translator. She’s a writer herself and as well as offering her own contained and graceful interpretation of the text, she was the person who selected the texts, came up with the underlying concept of character studies for the tinier fragments and proposed the narrative spine. This – along with the more granular writing joys of working out together how to translate the possibly untranslatable, e.g., how do you turn gerunds into Italian? – was an aspect of the collaboration I hadn’t envisaged and which was deeply rewarding.

Mia, 2022
Image provided by and used with kind permission of Mario Sughi

SG: I’m loving those details about translation and interpretation and it’s so fascinating to hear about the all the people who were involved and the support structure that seemed to work so well for you all. I’m particularly interested in how all of the stories and visual art explore how we inhabit places and how they inhabit us, too – with a particular focus on our relationship with the coast and parks, nature in the city – can you talk a little about your relationship to these themes?

MG: I rarely think of a character in isolation – oh there’s an angry man – and write from there. My characters usually come to me in situations – oh there’s an angry guy who’s a driving instructor. The situation often sets up an initial conflict (how can you be angry and a driving instructor, yikes). But it’s not just an emotional situation, it is material too. Where is this angry guy from? That’s often answered in the voice of the character, which in some cases I hear before I see. Then other questions follow: Where is he doing the instruction? How long has he done it? What did he do before it? When did he do the other thing? What happened to him doing the other thing – why did he stop?

I often start a story from the first person and this beg questions about time, which is in itself a form of Place. When is the story happening? What is the relationship between that When and the narrator’s When, the place they are telling the story from? These questions then beg other questions – and then, if I’m lucky, I’ve got a story.

For me, Mario’s work is all about people in place and place in people. You catch a glimpse of an image, which in his works is always a situation – someone doing something somewhere at some time – and you start asking yourself: how does that woman’s voice sound, what do those shorts feel like on those legs, where are those girls going after they’ve got their coffees? So perhaps we’re coming at similar hooks but from different directions.

Girls at Merrion Square
Image provided by and used with kind permission of Mario Sughi

SG: I really think you are – and this book, Dubliners, really shows this. I also love how you play with understatement, Mia, and how parallel to this, Mario plays with colour and seemingly simple lines in his work. Meaning is deep under the page. I’m thinking of, for example, “VII Slip, 2020” where you use humour to bring depth to the narrator and the story – there’s both naiveté and unease played out through the act of swimming in adverse conditions. Many of the stories and images explore transformation in some way – how bodies in nature – in the sea and lying on grass – as well as bodies in clothes – change and become another and other. Does this ring true for you in terms of intention and interest? 

MG: Yes, you’re absolutely right, I think transformation underlines all of my work. Human beings are always changing – time works through our bodies and our selves from moment to moment, constantly expanding, shrinking, twisting, tweaking us into new shapes. Nothing is fixed. In my twenties I remember being very freed by the idea that I didn’t have to be consistent. That the point of life wasn’t to arrive at a fixed point at 21, or whatever, and then go around presenting that to the world. For me, change is growth and learning and pain and all those things make life interesting. But I don’t consciously set out to write change, it’s just one of my obsessions.

People are very surprising and capable of doing ‘uncharacteristic’ things. It’s fun to me to shove a character into a situation they wouldn’t ordinarily choose and see what happens. Often the stress puts so much pressure on them they are forced to change their shape. Sometimes literally, like the water demon kelpie in Lure.

On a quantum level everything is connected. We are the universe. The ultimate transformation is from life into death and whatever happens – or doesn’t – then.

With Mario’s work, I feel there is always something happening. A character is always doing something, even if it’s ‘just’ watching. This is action. But action equates change in the fabric of spacetime. Mario’s people are captured for a nano-second in the ever-changing process of being. The next moment, they will be different as their neurons fire, their senses land on a new stimulus, they remember their dinner, they see someone they want to avoid. It’s like looking at a star. What we see has already changed because the light had to travel so far across the universe. The people Mario has captured are now gone, forever. I think there is a very moving quality to that.

TCD Cafeteria, 2017
Image provided by and used with kind permission of Mario Sughi

SG: It feels like you’ve encapsulated Mario’s work here, Mia! Dubliners also captures chance encounters, such as that in “IX: Found Wanting, 2018” and Mario’s image, “TCD Cafeteria, 2017” fits the story so well:

“…the edges of his consonants stroked the back of my neck…Pressing closer to share confidences, touching an elbow to make a point, accidentally – oops, sorry! – moving our pint glasses together so we’d have to brush each other’s hands when we went to take a sip.”

Can you talk about how the stories and images are informed by the urban setting?

MG: I’ve lived in Dublin all my life, with the exception of 9 months in Germany after leaving school. It was years before I had a car and now, because of climate change, I’ve chosen to no longer drive very much. As a result, I’ve walked, cycled, bussed, DARTed (and later Luas’ed) through huge swathes of the city as it’s undergone many, often fundamental, changes. I’m increasingly drawn to being in the countryside – my garden, the allotment, the forests, rivers, mountains, sea – but I rarely write about those places. If my work isn’t set in Dublin, it tends to be small-town Irish, or urban settings in other countries.

Even now, as I’m getting more exercised about climate catastrophe and injustice and more irritated by the way we plan (or don’t) our cities – my gut response, if someone asks me what I feel about Dublin, is to say I love it. And, in general, I love the idea of a city as a place of encounters, difference and growth. If a city is planned well, it can also be more sustainable as a place to live – so who knows?

Over the decades, I feel Dublin has made its way into me. It is me, in some way. When I walk it, I sense memories of older selves, older relationships. It can be a shock to see a street changed or gone – have my memories gone too? Maybe they’re still there, lying underneath the new build. For me, Dublin isn’t so much a setting, it is the story. Writing a story of Dublin is like writing a story of a particular part of me. The story you quoted from, Found Wanting, was written first in 2002, and set in the mid-late 1990s, when Dublin, and my life there, felt very exciting.

Mario’s work, to me, also has the quality of a flâneur’s vision. The urban observer. Mario captures moments that, by being captured, become significant. Look long enough at his work and I start doing the same thing, framing the everyday as an artwork. I think that’s a beautiful thing he offers the world.

SG: It strikes me that the book could also have been titled “Dubliners in Moments”….Yet behind the bright sun there’s also undertones of darkness, in “X Fairview 2022” and  “XIII Polyfilla, 2018” and, for me, how they bounced off Mario’s “Lockdown and Breakdown Series”, the juxtaposition of every day objects and the unspoken – the power of steam from a cup of coffee. Could you talk about the synchronicity of theme and interest in both art forms and perhaps even if this was a surprise to you both?

MG: I am intrigued by materials, the textures of things. Buildings, earth, trees, fabric, food, skin, cars. I worked as an actor and movement artist and I never feel happier than when I’m involved in some tactile activity. The challenge for me as a writer is to convey some of that sensation. How can I get a reader to sense, to feel, as opposed to think? I like to use sensation as a trigger for my characters’ actions. This happens in real life all the time. I’ll smell a person and suddenly I hate or love them – though I don’t know them from Adam – because the smell is calling up some ancient memory I may not even have words for.

In terms of synchronicity between my and Mario’s themes, his work resonates with me in lots of ways. It’s urban, it’s new, it’s off-kilter. I also see a similar preoccupation with textures and surfaces. At first glance I think Oh my god his Dublin is so bright and glowy and sunshiney and gorgeous, he makes Irish people look so sexy. But then I look deeper and there’s something else going on. An awkwardness in conversation, yawning gaps between people, uneasy isolation on a city street – which he emphasises very subtly in his Lockdown series. Under the gleam, something darker is at play.

I like how you pick up on our objects, e.g., the coffee cup. Objects are magical to me. They have a totemic value, and in literature I think they can reveal more about people than any amount of description about that person’s emotional toolkit. They ask questions too:

Who made that cup of coffee for the woman at the table? What is she going to say next?

And from there, you get Story.

SG: Yes and from story, life, and so we circle. To finish up, Mia, some fun questions:

  • Tea or Coffee? I love coffee but get very hyper on it. Usually for me: green tea before midday, infusions after that. Occasionally a teatime Earl Gray with a slice of lemon, no milk.
  • River or sea swimming? Both. The sea for the salt, the buoyancy, the space, the depth. The river for the tanny brown, the push of the current, the mystery, the trees. Both for the danger & the invaluable lesson to respect what’s bigger than me.
  • Beach or park? A forest park with a river or lake, amazing. But a beach, a strand, a shore, also amazing.
  • Music or quiet when writing? Quiet unless I’m in total flow, writing longhand with no inner editor switched on – in those moments I can have anything playing around me, it won’t bother me. Some music for when I’m musing but not physically writing.
  • What’s next up on your reading pile? What’s next up on your reading pile? Currently reading ‘Dschinns’, a book in German by Fatma Aydemir about Kurdish immigrants in Germany. Superb and engrossing – hopefully it’ll soon appear in English translation. Recently I finished Claire-Louise Bennett’s brilliant ‘Checkout 19’, and I am slowly working through Henning Mankell’s unsettling and profound memoir ‘Quicksand’. Next up: George Saunders’ ‘The Tenth of December’. 

More coverage of Dubliners:

  • LiteratureIreland: (Instagram) The sun is out in Dublin and the togs and swims will soon follow! This is a brilliant and bright bilingual Italian / English publication called Dubliners, by Mia Gallagher and Mario Sughi.

With thanks to Gráinne Killeen PR, and to Mia Gallagher and Mario Sughi for being so generous in taking part in my Writers/Artists Chat Series.

PART TWO, featuring a three-way conversation between Mario Sughi, Mia Gallagher and Shauna Gilligan, and featuring art by Sughi, will publish next week.

On Reading, Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writers with Artists

Exciting Book Post: Future Writers/Artists Chats

Photograph of stacked books. From bottom to top the titles are: Dubliners; Murder in the Monto/ The Geometer Lobachevsky; This Train is For: Keepsakes; Seven Steeples; Dolly Considine’s Hotel.

As followers of this blog will know, much of what I love doing is chatting to other writers, artists and readers. This week some beautiful book post arrived and I hope to chat to some of the creators on this blog soon…..Here is a little taste of what is to come as over the next few weeks there are exciting launches by Arlen House. Watch this space!

The second photograph above: Margo McNulty, Keepsakes; Mia Gallagher and Mario Sughi, Dubliners; Sara Baume, Seven Steeples

The third photograph below: Tony O’Reilly, Murder in the Monto; Bernie McGill, This Train is For; Adrian Duncan, The Geometer Lobachevsky.

LEFT TO RIGHT: Tony O’Reilly, Murder in the Monto; Bernie McGill, This Train is For; Adrian Duncan, The Geometer Lobachevsky.
Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read

Writers Chat 46: Amy Cronin on “Blinding Lies” (Poolbeg: Dublin, 2022)

Cover of Blinding Lies by Amy Cronin showing a woman in a darkened room looking through blinds on a window

Amy, You are very welcome to my WRITERS CHAT series. Congratulations on your debut novel, Blinding Lies (Poolbeg, 2022) which is a cracking read.

Let’s start with your journey to writing. It was something you always wanted to do but life happened – as it does – and it’s now that you’ve thrown yourself into the world of words. So why now? And why this genre?

AC: This genre is the one I read the most; crime and psychological thrillers are my go-to books. The escapism on offer, and the need to solve the mystery, is very appealing. When I was younger I loved mystery stories; the Nancy Drew series was a firm favourite. This has continued into adulthood, and as this is the type of book I love to read, it’s what I was drawn to write.

Why now? I think it had a lot to do with turning 40 during lockdown and the general sense of unease the pandemic brought, the feeling that life is for living, and if I truly want to give writing a shot, then I have to dedicate myself to finishing something and put myself out there. My favourite subject in school was English, but I didn’t study it in college. I focused on business, marketing and management, but I never stopped tinkering around with words. I’ve written stories my whole life, and during the pandemic I focused like I never have before on finishing my first book. It was cathartic, a great escape from the daily coverage on TV and radio. Writing Blinding Lies was addictive, something I looked forward to everyday. It finally felt like the timing was right.

SG: It’s great to hear that you continued with your passion – and the way you describe your writing process it sounds like it really was the right book and the right time. And how fantastic that as a writer you now get to give your readers the escapism that you so much enjoy.

There are several aspects to Blinding Lies that stood out for me. The first is the protagonist, Anna Clarke. She’s the underdog, working in the administrative section of the Garda Station and yet manages – perhaps because of her mathematical background – to see patterns that lead to complex crimes being solved. Tell me about the origins of Anna.

AC: I wrote a chapter featuring Anna many, many years ago. I had read so many books where the protagonist is a seasoned man, capable and experienced, and he invariably saves the day. I really wanted to read a similar book featuring a woman who could do the same. It wasn’t until I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that I found a character who felt believable in that role. The only problem I had with Lisbeth Salander was that I couldn’t relate to her. I adore her character still, in the books and the movies, but she felt very far removed from anything I could connect with.

In creating Anna I wanted her to be really ordinary, like myself and most people I know. I wanted readers to be able to relate to her. I found a lot of resources online, writing.ie, inkwellwriters.ie, and had done some writing courses, so I knew my heroine needed to reach readers in a way that made them root for her. As I wrote, I found I was really rooting for her too!

When Anna Clarke was 16 her parents disappeared. Up until that point, she was living what could be considered a very normal life. After that, she and her older brother live with the continuing mystery, never moving closer to solving what happened. As a child Anna’s father taught them self-defence games and encouraged them into his passion, Tae-kwon Do. After his disappearance, focusing on this gave Anna a lifeline out of depression and worry, and as the book opens, she’s a black-belt, continuing her training, and teaching self-defence to young children. She’s drawn to logic, to numbers, studying mathematics and statistics in college, working for the Gardaí to compile statistical reports. Numbers offer the comfort of certainty, which appeals to her as a balm to the enduring uncertainty of what happened to her parents. Anna is a strong woman, yet vulnerable, leaning on her brother often, yet resenting his interfering ‘father-figure’ role. She’s flawed, not always making the right decisions, but her moral compass is set straight, and it’s her determination to help her friend Kate that propels the plot in Blinding Lies.

SG: And again, the idea of helping a childhood friend is something that we can all relate to. The themes of self-defence is key to both the narrative and also two of the main characters. Anna teaches and practices Taekwondo-Do and another interesting female character, Kate Crowley, is a kick-boxing champion. Was this a theme that interests you or did it come to you as you developed the characters?

AC: It was suggested to me by an early reader, when the book was in the first-draft stage, that Anna be a kick-boxer, to add plausibility to scenes where she’s under threat. By that point I had already decided she was studying and teaching Tae-Kwon Do, mainly because I did so myself and know how beneficial it is in general.

The kick-boxing idea grew though, and I used it as a point to confuse Anna and the reader, to input doubt over the character of Kate – I wanted her to be someone we aren’t sure is guilty or innocent. Anna is certain her childhood best friend is innocent of murder. But she learns that in the years they lost touch Kate learned kick-boxing to a high level, and with her own knowledge of self-defence, Anna then begins to doubt Kate – if she was capable of defending herself so skilfully, why shoot a man dead?

I studied Tae-Kwon Do when I was young, although not for as long as I would have liked! It has always appealed to me, and I planned it as a facet of Anna’s character to be the crutch she would lean on to recover from the disappearance of her parents. It offered an anchor, something to focus on. I know that the skills taught in self-defence go beyond the manoeuvres – I wanted Anna to have a calm mind, to have self-control when it mattered most. I know Tae-Kwon Do can cultivate this level of discipline, so it was always going to part of her story. The fact that it was her father’s passion was something I found very emotional to write. Anna trains as much to feel close to him as anything else.

SG: Yes, the link to her father came through very strongly and I thought that link between the body and mind in Tae-Kwon Do was really interesting and key to Anna’s character. At the heart of the Gallagher-Crowley dynamic is David’s abuse and coercive control of his wife, and his father’s control of his empire. Can you talk a little about this theme of control?

AC: Control, or attempting to restore it, is certainly a theme through Blinding Lies. Anna Clarke is the protagonist. In her training, in her job, in everything she does, she is measured, to counterbalance how out-of-control her life went when she was 16. In that respect, she and Tom Gallagher, the main antagonist, are very similar. Both are seeking to control the world around them to a high level.

For Tom Gallagher, we learn that everything he has built up, his criminal business, his respect and status, was borne of control. While his son David was abusive, what Tom lamented most about that was his loss of control, which ultimately led detectives to the family, and ended up with David dead. David’s loss of control is rippling into Tom’s existence and he can’t stand it. Everything he does in Blinding Lies is about regaining the control he feels slipping away from him.

It’s interesting that control is such a strong theme throughout Blinding Lies, as it was written at a time when the world felt completely out of control to me. The world around me was shutting down because of a new virus as I wrote, and as the main characters fought for control in their world, I was coming to realise I had very little in mine! I write with a vague ‘start-middle-end’ outline, and I didn’t realise until the book was finished how much the characters rely on and seek to gain control. But as I said, writing Blinding Lies was cathartic during the early stages of the pandemic!

SG: Isn’t it really interesting how what’s going on for the author becomes distilled in their writing? Parallel to this theme is the idea of people having two sides, and also of fighting for a better life. I felt this was captured well in the characterisation of Tobias.

“Tobias…had fought his way to this position in life. It had come to him the hard way. There were bodies stacked up behind him, in his past, people he’d had to move out of his way. Sometimes, at night, he dreamt of their faces, how their skin had sagged, and their muscles had twitched in the final moments between life and death. At night, he felt vulnerable, freaked out by the dead. By day he was in charge again, a man not to be crossed, nor to be defied.”

So many of the characters know what they want and will go to great lengths to get it. Can you comment on this?

AC: Such characters are great propellers of plot; decisive, driven, charismatic. For me, this book was my attempt to finally immerse myself in writing and go after what I really wanted. I guess that’s reflected in the characters too. Regardless of what they want – be it revenge, the truth, closure and peace – the characters are determined to get it. Anyone with ambition, for whatever that might be, can relate to that.

Most of the characters in Blinding Lies are driven by love for their family, which is a very powerful force; Anna, for her parents and for her friend. Kate is driven by saving her sister and nieces; Tom Gallagher by love for his wife and son John, and by avenging his son David’s death. All things are a mix of light and darkness; in even the worst of characters, there is some redemption, and in the best of characters there are elements of shadow. Striving to rise above, being ambitious, are traits readers can understand, can get on board with. And they make memorable characters that turn the pages.

In the case of Tobias, he is a minor character but his actions have a big impact on the antagonist. Tobias does terrible things, and the “bodies stacked up behind him” allow the reader to gain a glimpse of his past. But there is an element of fear in him too – the people he killed freak him out at night, and in Blinding Lies, he cannot return to his employer empty handed, with his mission incomplete. I wasn’t trying to elicit sympathy for him, rather to show that like all people, his nature is multi-faceted.

SG: Yes, I think that’s why I found his character interesting -he’s more than what he seems. I also found that the workings of the various rankings in the Gardaí were well done – I especially loved the scene when Detective Sergeant William Ryan goes to one of the major crime scenes and “closed his eyes and inhaled, breathing the scene deep into his lungs. Anna’s voice played in his head as though he had recorded her testimony and was playing it back…He cut an unusual figure, standing in the middle of the room with his eyes closed and his arms by his sides, turning this way and that…” Can you talk about your research into investigative procedures and methods?

AC: The internet helped with this, as did absorbing information from the countless crime novels I have read. I also have a garda friend who happily answered questions, but I didn’t delve too deeply into detail. I tried hard to get the garda procedures right, but ultimately, Anna is a clerical officer, not a detective, and so I didn’t dwell too much on detailing procedures.

I love the character of William Ryan, but I really don’t know any detectives like him! He’s young, a little eccentric, a little off-putting to some colleagues, but ultimately very like Anna Clarke – his moral compass is set straight.

SG: It’s great to read a book set in a place that is familiar or that you know well. I loved how Cork was so real – street names, hotel names – and also fictionalised to a large extent, to fit the story. Tell me about that process of setting the scene – it felt like you’d researched the city in terms of traffic, weather, times it takes to get from place to place.

AC: I’ve lived in Cork all my life; well, except for some time spent living and working in the UK, when I was very homesick! I grew up in the countryside, then moved to the city to live for eight years, before moving back to the countryside again. Initially I was unsure about setting Blinding Lies in my home county, but as I wrote, I realised there was nowhere else it could be. It felt right to set the novel in familiar territory.

Some place names are real and some are fictional. The Garda station in Blinding Lies, for example, is called the Lee Street station. This doesn’t exist but is named after Cork’s River Lee. It felt right not to accurately name some places. But other places are steeped in memory for me – such as the fountain on the Grand Parade where Anna meets Myles, and it was lovely to include that.

SG: Finally, I found myself thinking about a question as I read Blinding Lies – how well can we ever know anyone, including our family? There’s a lot of intrigue, passion, and greed in the novel – it’s what drives many of the characters including the Gallaghers – and there’s Anna’s burning desire to find out why people do what they do, including disappear. Can you talk about this?

AC: This is certainly true; how well do we ever really know the people close to us? Often that’s not called into question until extreme events take place.

In Blinding Lies, Anna’s brother Alex is worried about reopening the search for their parents, because he was a lot older than Anna when they disappeared, and he remembers things that lead him to believe he didn’t really know who they were. This, of course, is unsettling for him. He’s an insomniac, constantly worried about keeping his sister safe, never able to relax. The questions that consume him are not just where their parents are, but who they were.

Of course, some people do know the inner nature of those close to them, and chose to turn away from that truth, as Mae Gallagher does for her husband, and as she did for her son David.

Anna is the opposite of that – she’s a deep thinker, and for ten years the need to understand her parents’ situation has burned inside her, and it has shaped how she looks at people and situations, I think. She should have walked away from Kate’s plight, but she needs to understand it, because she cannot understand the terrible events that shaped her life when she was 16.

Ultimately, for the characters, if they cannot understand the people around them and why events have taken place, the ground feels very shaky, and control is lost.

  • SG: I can’t leave our chat without mentioning the last line of the novel, “it was time to discover the truth”. Ae looking at a trilogy or a series?

AC: I’m very happy to say that Blinding Lies is the first book of a trilogy. I didn’t realise Anna’s story would span three books until I started to write. But it’s not just her story, it’s her parents’ and Tom Gallagher’s as well. I’ve always enjoyed reading a set of novels about the same character, and I hope readers will take Anna to their hearts and follow her journey.

SG: I have no doubt they will, Amy! And now for some fun questions:

  • Cork county or city? Cork county, because it’s home.
  • Mountains or sea? The sea, definitely.
  • Tea or Coffee? Coffee.
  • What are you reading now? Right now I’m reading The Widow by K.L. Slater.
  • What are you writing now? I’m currently finishing the third book in the trilogy.
Amy Cronin holding a copy of her debut novel Blinding Lies

Connect with Amy on Twitter: @AmyCroninAuthor

With thanks to Poolbeg and Peter O’Connell Media for the advance copy of Blinding Lies