'The Girl Who Came Home' a Titanic success

It's the centenary year of the Titanic disaster, and a Kilcullen writer has recently published a novel based on one of the most poignant individual Irish stories to come from that tragedy, writes Brian Byrne. And her 'The Girl Who Came Home' is already a big success as an Amazon Kindle ebook.

Since she was a child in her native Yorkshire, Hazel Gaynor has had a fascination with all things Titanic, and once she became a freelance journalist she promised herself that she would one day write about it.

In particular, she became very interested in the story of the 'Addergoole Fourteen', a group from the small parish of that name just outside Killala in County Mayo. They had boarded the Titanic at Queenstown, intent on making a better life in America. Only three survived the sinking of the 'unsinkable' ship.

"I think it was the biggest loss of life from one small area in the Titanic disaster," says Hazel, who set up as a freelance writer three years ago, centred around her blog 'Hot Cross Mum'. "I had been researching stories of Titanic survivors with an Irish connection and came across this group, which today has a large society concerned with preserving their memory."

Inspired by the group's story, Hazel began writing her novel just four months ago, with her main character Maggie Murphy, a young girl who came back from the incident. Thus the title, 'The Girl who Came Home'.

"My story is entirely fictional, and so is the village in which I base it. I had always wanted to write a novel based on the Titanic story, showing the human aspects of it rather than the construction elements of the tragedy."

Hazel stresses that there's no family connection of any kind with the Titanic, that the story had just grabbed her interest. "Since I was quite young, from the first time I heard of it, it all seemed so incredible. The story about this amazing ship, and how on earth could it possibly have sunk on its maiden voyage? The whole folklore around it just struck me from the time I was a child."

She feels it is such an enormous story, but becomes even more fascinating when you get down into researching the detail, and the stories of those who survived, or died.

"I was in my teens when they discovered the remains of the ship on the bottom of the Atlantic and began to bring parts of it back. It's like a kind of myth that we're living in the time of—it's not so far away that it has actually become the stuff of legend. There are terrible stories, but incredible stories too which have come out of it."

'The Girl who Came Home' links elements of that great tragedy with today, through Maggie Murphy's great grand-niece, a journalist living in 1982. It is a past love story and a story of a modern woman rolled into one.

Hazel was in discussion with an Irish publisher to produce 'The Girl who Came Home' in the traditional way, but, as she puts it, 'it got close, but no cigar'. "I realised that I had a small period of time to pick up on all the things that are happening in this centenery year, so I decided to publish it on Amazon, using the Kindle Direct Publishing system."

The book went 'live' on Amazon recently. The cover design is by Andrew Brown at Design for Writers in the UK, and the image of Titanic incorporated in it is from a painting by Belfast based artist Jim McDonald who kindly gave Hazel permission to use it on the cover.

Anyobody who wants to explore this particular aspect of the Titanic through the eyes and memories of Hazel's character, Maggie Murphy, can download it onto their Kindles, or Kindle apps on their smartphones, computers or iPads. Our review of the book can be read here.

This article was originally published in The Kildare Nationalist.


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