My new novel, Shellybanks, is set largely in my birth country of Ireland. Shellybanks is an unprepossessing beach in Dublin Bay. A place of grey sand and jellyfish and industrial smells and fierce tides that race in quickly and drown children who never learned to swim. Protagonist Kate Delaney, whom we follow after my first novel, Pheasants Nest, was nearly one of those children as a little girl, and a dream about running for the sea wall at Shellybanks is a symbol for her of anxiety.
She has much to be anxious about. This book is about what happens after a huge trauma – a trauma that has struck fear into the hearts of every woman across a nation, and a trauma that is hidden and left to fester for decades. How a young woman and her middle-aged aunt bond over these terrible histories. It’s about a secretive and scary cult-like group, about a stolen baby, a mother’s search to find her, and another mother’s desperation to keep her. It’s about secrets and lies in Irish culture, the vast changes in a generation in the experience of women.
Kate Delaney is recovering from a crime that is every woman’s worst nightmare: being raped and kidnapped by a stranger and left for dead under a creepy bridge with only the ghosts of suicides to keep her company. She escapes her life as an investigative journalist in Melbourne and goes to a perfect Greek island with her boyfriend, Liam, who is trying to do his best to help her cope. But how can he? Where is the instruction manual for something so huge?
Just as they are settling into life on the island, Kate gets a phone call from Dublin from her beloved favourite aunt, Dolores, whose fiancé suddenly dies. Kate and Liam go to Dublin for the funeral. That’s when, in a pea soup fog at Shellybanks, Kate discovers that Dolores had a secret life that she never spoke of to her family. As an often-neglected teenager in a typically large family with an absent father and stressed mother of eleven children, she was in the 1970s tricked into joining a cult-like group on the pretence of doing a cookery course. She’s groomed and enslaved by a shadowy organisation only known as ‘the Group’. This fictional organisation was in part inspired by some background work I did for my Four Corners story, “Purity”, in 2023.
Dolores enlists Kate’s help as an investigative journalist, and helping Dolores helps Kate come to terms with her own trauma. Now it’s up to Kate, Dolores, and a kindly Irish Garda, Inspector Christy Redmond, to investigate a seemingly impossible crime.
Shellybanks is a love song to my gritty birth city of Dublin and its people. It charts an almost miraculous transformation of a culture in the space of a generation and the experience of being a migrant who at once feels deeply part of the culture and always outside it. Always at the centre of this story is the experience of Irish women – let down for generations by church and state, but with unforgettable, endearing, funny and heartbreaking characters that you don’t want to leave behind. It charts how these women have moved out of a straightened, and often dark place to a modernity that still holds the scars of the past but is imbued with hope and courage.
More info here.