About the Book

The Story Behind The Library at the Edge of the World

It’s the physical world that they live in that shapes the characters in Finfarran’s scattered communities, and their shared social and cultural inheritance that brings them together as a unit to fight for their identity. I love the contradiction inherent in the fact that what saves Hanna both emotionally and practically is the network of support that she’s rejected for years, for fear of gossip. And I love the fact that the spark that ignited her life was a passion for pictures, not words. She wasn’t raised in a family that was bookish. She’s discovered the joy of reading for herself.

It was while eating lemon drizzle cake with my agent in the café at the Charles Dickens Museum in London that I conceived the idea of an Irish librarian who gives up her career for love and, twenty-five years later, discovers that her marriage has been a sham. What would she do? Where could she go? What are the consequences of ditching your life and starting off again where you began?

When I was a child growing up in Dublin, the city was half the size it is today and, despite its elegant Georgian architecture and internationally-recognized literary reputation, large numbers of Dubliners would return each summer to the countryside to work on family farms. My own experience of the magic of life in rural Ireland comes both from childhood visits on rattling trains to visit my country granny, and from my current peripatetic life between London and an Irish-speaking community which, while utterly modern, retains a profound awareness of the past. And my love of the particular colors and patterns of Irish speech comes both from a lifetime of listening in two languages and a sense of the inherent rhythmic differences between urban and rural life.

The fictional Finfarran Peninsula, where English is the everyday language as it is in most of Ireland, is a microcosm of many aspects of contemporary rural Irish life. Looking back now, I can see how it’s informed by different facets of my own experience. My father’s family came from Galway, on the west coast, and my mother’s people were from the little market town of Enniscorthy, in County Wexford, in the southeast: the landscape I’ve created for the peninsula contains suggestions of both places. And, while the older characters in The Library at the Edge of the World owe much to my childhood memories of Ireland’s unchanging rural hierarchies, the characters of Conor and the HabberDashery girls reflect the exuberant enterprise and creativity that I see around me today.

Hanna belongs to a generation that, for lack of career opportunities at home, went abroad to find a future, and the kids with whom Jazz went to school in Lissbeg still live with the idea of emigration as a threat, not a choice. But because emigration has long been part of the Irish experience, its isolated rural communities have a powerful sense of being linked to a worldwide diaspora. These days, this sense is supported by telecoms and social media. The same links have been forged and maintained from time immemorial through storytelling, voyaging, and books.

In a sense, Lissbeg Library is a metaphor for Ireland’s cultural consciousness, as well as a setting for individual empowerment through communal aspiration. Though I’m not sure that I could have conceived it that way without the experience of living in a rural community that places such a high value on the preservation of its distinctively native Irish culture through the passing on of stories, place names, and poems.

I sketched the geography of my fictional peninsula on a paper napkin that day in the Charles Dickens Museum Café, and thereafter the characters and the outline for a series of books came easily. I suppose that starting with a map was instinctive: when you’ve written for television you’re constantly aware of the narrative value of the physical, and of the vital importance of consistency in an episodic series. Besides, every Irish author has been raised on the cautionary tale of James Joyce, exiled in Paris, struggling to retain the memory of the Dublin streetscapes that provided the vital framework of his books. Making a map, therefore, seemed like the only logical starting point. And, although I redrew it tidily soon afterwards, I still keep the original paper napkin. It’s never failed me yet as a source of inspiration, despite—or maybe because of—the crossings-out and corrections, and the faint indications of lemon drizzle cake consumed.

During one of her weekly trips in the peninsula’s mobile library van, Hanna realizes that “for millennia, written words had conveyed dreams, visions, and aspirations across oceans and mountains, and as she steered between puddles and potholes she was part of a process that stretched across distance and time, linking handwritten texts from Egypt and Mesopotamia with the plastic-covered novels, CDs, and celebrity cookbooks lined up in the back of her van.”

As a reader, you too are part of this enchanting process, just as I am, as an author. So I hope that, like Hanna, you’ll find a feeling of belonging in Finfarran. A sense of recognition. A desire to cross boundaries and embrace new colors, patterns, and ideas. Most of all, I hope you’ll enjoy the people and places that you find there, and that you’ll keep coming back.