Thank you so much for choosing to read The Girl with the Emerald Flag. I hope you enjoyed it! If you did and would like to be the first to know about my new releases, click below to sign up to my mailing list.
Sign up here!
This book required a lot of research, and it was difficult to get the balance right in the historical strand between the real-life events and the emotional story arcs of the fictional characters. I’m married to an Irishman and we have dozens of books on Irish history, plus biographies of prominent Irish people, on our bookshelves. I spent a long time reading them all before embarking on this novel.
For the first time in my novels, the ‘contemporary’ strand isn’t actually contemporary because I wanted my historical fiction character to still be alive. 1998, the year the Good Friday Agreement was signed, seemed the obvious date to use. I set this part of the book in Brighton and Sussex university, because that’s where I was a student (in the 1980s) and I have happy memories of that time.
I wrote a lot of this novel while touring Spain in our motorhome, trying to channel the joys of Irish weather while sitting in the Spanish winter sun. An author needs a good imagination!
I hope you loved The Girl with the Emerald Flag and if you did, I would be so grateful if you would leave a review. I always love to hear what readers thought, and it helps new readers discover my books too.
Thanks,
Kathleen McGurl