Review: The Cottingley Secret

The Cottingley Secret. Hazel Gaynor. Historical fiction.

A magical book, writes Brian Byrne. It is, after all, about fairies. And fairies are the essence of magic.

Few of us admit to believing in them. But equally there are few who, somewhere in the depths of our childhood memories, can't resurrect some level of belief. It was a comfort when the real world was tough and gross and frightening, that we could depend on something, some beings, which we couldn't see but which were nice, and friendly, and safe.

It is precisely because the world had recently been so tough and gross and frightening almost a hundred years ago that many were ready to believe in fairies after two young cousins, Elsie, the older, and Frances, showed photographs they had taken near the stream at the bottom of their garden in a village in Yorkshire. The iconic one is Frances looking dreamily at a parade of fairies playing in the grass.

It was a prank, made possible by Elsie's skill as an artist and as a photographer's assistant. A secret meant only for their family. But, as a kindly Irish teacher in Hazel Gaynor's fictionalised account of it said, 'small villages can't keep secrets … they have a funny way of setting them free, and who knows where they'll end up?'

The Cottingley fairies secret ended up in the hands of 'important men from London' in 1920 who included the writer Arthur Conan Doyle. He and the other 'important men' declared the photographs to be genuine. After the trauma of the Great War, the nation needed something nice to believe in. And it did, mostly, when serious articles were written about the matter. The two girls later went on to live their lives separated by the Atlantic Ocean, but kept their secret until sixty years on when Elsie finally confessed in public. Though Frances's belief, that she had watched fairies at the spot ever before they went to take the pictures, never wavered to the day she died.

The story is from Hazel Gaynor's own Yorkshire, one which she grew up with and which she believes today is the reason she was meant to become a writer, so that it could be the core of what is her fourth novel. That became a magical process in its own right.

The first scatter of fairy dust was in her discovery that a daughter of Frances was still alive. Christine Lynch lives in Belfast, and was very happy to meet Hazel and, even better, to give her access to Frances's own memoir about the events.

Then there's the kind of magic which Hazel practices herself. She takes an historical nugget from the early twentieth century time that she so obviously loves, and creates her own characters to tell a story in a way far more fascinating and accessible than would dry history or contemporary journalism. She developed the technique with her three novels before this one, and in The Cottingley Secret she has added a new thread to the weave. Fairy fantasy. Or is it fantasy?

This is a book of two times. Of Elsie and Frances and their prank in Yorkshire a century ago which took in so many eminent minds of the real world of then, and of a fictional young woman in a Dublin of today who has uncomfortable personal and business decisions to make. It is in the melding of their stories through which we can perhaps properly understand what happened in that small village.

The Cottingley fairies story is well documented, and has been regularly rehearsed down the decades since the photographs were first taken — on cameras which Hazel's narrative prompted me as a photographer to research with some interest. But her interpretation of it is … well, that word again, magical.

The Cottingley Secret switches between the narrative of a young girl in 1917 heading towards her teens and that of a young woman in the time of now. Hazel has found and written the voices of both, in textures and contexts that allow us believe we are listening to — and even are a part of — their actual lives.

Hazel's ability to describe locations and timeline backgrounds have been honed through her previous books. And her Cottingley as the reader experiences in this one is its real place, with real people. Even the fictional ones don't ask us to pause and wonder where actuality and imagination merge.

As we grow older it becomes less easy to write in the voice we had when we were children. Hazel remembers that voice, and in the character of Frances we hear her in her time and mind. Equally for Olivia in today, the young woman with modern emotions and concerns is alive right through to the last page. Making this to be one of those stories that you don't want to stop reading. And yet which, when you know you are close to the end, you do stop reading so that you can save a little to savour just that bit later.

Then, there are the fairies. This thread in Hazel Gaynor's latest book doesn't offer an explanation. It is the wondering if? Suggesting that she herself is still open to the essence of her story. Were there really, or are there, fairies?

We can believe or we can wonder. And if there isn't anything to wonder about, well, life is without magic.

The Cottingley Secret is published in the UK and Ireland on 7 September. A very special Kilcullen launch will be held in Woodbine Books on 15 September.

'Meet Me in Monaco' is published here

Heather Webb and Hazel Gaynor, on research for their 'Meet Me in Monaco' novel.

“Here I was, a writer from Kilcullen, Ireland, standing in a crowded bookshop in Charleston, USA, and everyone there with a copy of ‘Meet Me in Monaco’ in their hand.”

Hazel Gaynor recalls one day during the summer which was a true ‘pinch myself’ moment, writes Brian Byrne. “It was surreal, but it was lovely that these were people who had followed me from the very beginning, and now could come to their local bookstore and meet me.”

That event was just one of 15 such, across six US states over a period of 12 days in July. Hazel and her American co-author of ‘Monaco’ Heather Webb were taking part in the promotional tour for the book following its US launch. “It sounds glamorous, but it was fairly relentless, a lot of travel. I imagine it could be very lonely doing it on your own, but with Heather it was just so much fun. We laughed our way through it.”

The UK and Irish launch of the pair’s second collaboration was this week, on 5 September. Just coincidentally, their first one, ‘Last Christmas in Paris’ published two years ago, got into the USA Today Best Seller list last week. “So altogether it has been a very exciting time.”

Heather had previously crossed the Atlantic to meet up with Hazel for some 'on the ground' research for the book. Obviously set in Monaco, so that’s where they went for a week. “We had written the last couple of drafts for revision, and though the book is set in the 1950s, we both knew that if you can actually visit where a story is set, it helps to get a geographical sense.”

The story has as background the ‘whirlwind period’ when Hollywood film star Grace Kelly was getting married to Prince Rainier of Monaco, whom she had met just a year previously at the Cannes Film Festival. Choosing something quite different to their previous collaboration was deliberate. “‘Last Christmas in Paris’ was in WW1, in Paris in winter. This time we wanted something in summer, with Hollywood glamour. When Grace Kelly’s name came up in a brainstorming session, we knew it was the one.”

The fictional characters in the novel are a young French perfumer based in Grasse, the perfume capital of Europe in the hills above Monaco, and a British press photographer covering the fairytale wedding. “They are based on real people who would have been around the situation at the time.”

As part of their Monaco trip, Hazel and Heather visited Grasse, and actually made some perfume. So as they were putting the finishing touches to their novel they were able to inject some real experience. “There was an actual perfume commissioned by the royal couple for their wedding, so this was a great help. The perfumer is struggling to make her reputation, and Grace Kelly is sort of a fairy godmother to her in the story.”

Though the razzmatazz around the latest book has been happening only in the last couple of months, it's in the nature of publishing that both authors are already well into their next works, both solo and collaborative.

“Since my last solo book ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter’ was published, I’ve lost about a year of the Hazel Gaynor books, so I’m very happy to be working on my next solo historical novel. Though not officially announced yet, it is set in WW2 and I’m really excited to get behind the scenes of a different period."

Hazel and Heather are also in the early stages of another collaborative project, scheduled for publication in late 2020 or early 2021. “That’s a writer’s life, always working far ahead of publication.”

Hazel’s own writing life has also developed much further along from when she had just one project on the go, relatively easy to manage. Dealing with what has become a ‘juggling act’ means careful scheduling of her time.

“At the moment I try and work Monday and Tuesday on the next book with Heather, and Wednesday through Friday on my own latest book. Then, maybe if I’m up early or when the boys have finished homework or are at sports, I try and do the adminy stuff.”

That ‘adminy stuff’ can include preparing for The Inspiration Project, a series of writing workshops which Hazel founded with two other Irish authors. “I'm also planning festivals — I’m doing the Kildare Readers Festival in October, and the Red Line and the Maeve Binchy Dalkey Festival. I can also be reading another author’s book in prep for an interview. So there’s a lot of non-writing work that has to be done.”

As well, of course, managing life and family within all that, ‘just like with any other job’. Meantime, though, with some signing of 'Meet Me in Monaco' at Woodbine Books for her many local fans, more of the fun stuff has been happening this week.


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Review: The Girl from The Savoy

The Girl from The Savoy. Hazel Gaynor. Historical romance.

As a fan of thrillers and detective mysteries, this was never going to be my kind of book, writes Brian Byrne. Romantic historical fiction just doesn’t get space on my bookshelf. So while I waited for my pre-ordered ebook edition of 'The Girl from The Savoy' to drop into my iPad last week, my main interest was because it was Hazel Gaynor's third novel, and I admire the tenacity with which she has successfully established herself as an author. I also admire her writing skill, honed initially from a blog set up after she came to live in Kilcullen, now at the level of having four completed books and achieving writer conference keynote speaker status. But the story of a hotel maid whose burning ambition is to become a dance and revue star in the Bright Young Things era of post-WW1 London was never going to be at the top of my must-read list.

Except that once started, I couldn't put it down. As it happened, the book came to me while I was on holidays, during which I had already gone through a new Vatican-themed whodunnit bought at the airport and an old Inspector Wexford mystery left in a cupboard of our holiday apartment. It wasn't that I was short of something to do, as I bring my own writing work with me on holidays anyhow, and between this and exploring new places, time is well filled. But as soon as Dolly Lane arrived, she took over. As is mentioned in the book by many of the characters, there's 'something' about Dolly.

There are three primary people in this latest story from Hazel Gaynor. Dolly, her childhood friend and husband to be but gone to war Teddy, and darling of the London and New York stages Loretta. The author adopts the technique of having the voice of each separately tell their stories in the first person, a chapter at a time. Other characters and situations that both link and divide them appear in the narratives of each, where relevant. At first, these seem like lives fairly straightforward for their times. Dolly, moving from domestic service to serving the needs of the high-flying clientele of The Savoy. Teddy, desperately trying to recover from what was then known as ‘shell shock’. Loretta, at the peak of her career and determined to help someone else emulate her achievements.

Quickly enough, we think we know each of them. And what is going to happen to them and between them. Except that Hazel Gaynor has developed a deft touch of leaving clues through her stories which can mislead as much as lead. So the lives not just of her three main characters here, but many of the peripheral ones too, can take turns just as unexpected as do many of our real lives. This is partly why I found it difficult to put down ‘The Girl from The Savoy’.

The period setting is, like her previous books, around a hundred years ago. That’s an era which fascinates the author, and it’s clear that she revels in researching the detail for the background to whatever her current writing project is. We as readers get the benefit of that in how she figuratively paints her canvas on which to allow her characters to develop. It’s the detail, not overdone but there, which brings us into that period as we read. Which involves us with the fictional people to the level that they seem real. What’s also clear is that a century later, the things that are important to people haven’t changed. The pursuit of romance, love, ambition. The attraction of charisma, of drama, of music. The wish, so often remaining as just that, to be more than what we are.

And if there was just one line to describe what goes on in ‘The Girl from The Savoy’, it’s possibly that last. Dolly and her fellow travellers in this very real fictional life, becoming more than what they are.

No, it was never going to be my kind of book. Except that it turns out that it is.

Review: A Memory of Violets

A Memory of Violets. Hazel Gaynor. Historical fiction romance.

This is a woman's book, writes Brian Byrne. A mother's book. A daughter's book. A sister's book. Obviously I'm none of those, which may explain why it took me so long between beginning to read it and finishing it. I bought 'Violets' at Hazel's local launch in Naas, and I've just closed the last page in the sunlight of one of our good summer days. Don't in any way hold that long time against it.

There's very little sunlight in the beginning of this one. The place and the period are the cold, dirty, smokey and dangerous streets of 19th century London. The main characters then are the poverty Irish, in particular two little sisters who spend their days selling flowers, for pittances they hope will be enough to ward off a beating from their father at home in the slums.

It's a story of the elder looking out for the younger who is blind. Florrie and Rosie, Rosie suddenly gets lost and Florrie spends many years afterwards searching for the little one.

Almost four decades later there are two other sisters, living up north in the country, with their own troubles and tragedies. When one, Tilly, comes to the city to work with a charity that was set up for the flower girls, some strange linkages begin to happen. For the rest, well, you'll just have to read the book.

'A Memory of Violets' is quite different to Hazel Gaynor's first and best-seller 'The Girl Who Came Home'. The scope then was larger, the tragedy greater. But there are similarities in the author's love of the early 1900s as a place to write in. And in the way she can virtually live in that period with her characters as they grow.

Every era has its own language, and while it can be relatively easy to fill in descriptions and mores of a time, getting the words and idioms and accents, the voices of people living there, is a much more difficult exercise. It seems to me that Hazel Gaynor has this ability, though I suspect she spends many long hours honing her dialogue to be correct in its time and place.

'A Memory of Violets' and its characters are fiction, but based on real people, events and achievements. The fiction is the skillful weaving of characterisation and happening so that we have a story to maintain interest. And, notwithstanding the long time it took me to finish it, the story did hold my attention. To the point that each of the many times I went back to it, the book immediately re-enfolded me into its story-telling without my having in any way to reread parts or renew acquaintance with its people.

Hazel was always going to write this story. She acknowledges a former teacher in Driffeld School who had once cast the younger her as Eliza Doolittle in 'My Fair Lady'. In an interview last year, she told me that the story of the flower sellers had always fascinated her. But it wasn't until she began to looker closer at their lives that she found the much more fascinating element which is the foundation of this novel.

My finishing it in the sunshine was apt, as, like in all best romances, the story in 'Violets' ends well. There are happily ever afters to counter the toils and tribulations. Though not without some unexpected twists, and an element of other-world that I particularly liked.

It's also apt that I finally got to finish it as the book is currently top of the historical fiction sales on Amazon. And at a time when Hazel herself has been buried in the personal turbulence of finishing her latest book. With, I suspect, the same meticulousness, passion, and professionalism that characterises all her work. As is typified by 'A Memory of Violets'.

Review: The Girl who Came Home

The Girl who Came Home. Hazel Gaynor. Historical romance.
When there's something that you always want to do, there comes a time to do it, writes Brian Byrne. And if you don't do it at that time, then you probably never will. The trick is to know when the time comes.

For local writer Hazel Gaynor, the time came, and she noticed it. The result is her first novel, 'The Girl who Came Home'. It's a Titanic novel, in the sense that it is located on that ship of terrible tragedy, and in the places where some of the Irish passengers came from and where some survivors might have gone to.

Hazel has been fascinated by the story of the Titanic since she was a small child. Not for any particular reason, just that the enormity of the story grabbed her imagination when she first heard about it. She always gathered information about the tragic event, and any time she came across a related article she assimilated every word.

The fictional characters and the fictional Irish village in 'The Girl who Came Home' are all based on a real set of people, and a real village near Killala in Co Mayo. The 'Addergoole Fourteen' were a group of men and women from there who sailed on the Titanic. Only three survived. Today there is a strong Titanic heritage in Addergoole, concerned with properly preserving the memory of what was a massive loss to a small community.

Hazel's main character is Maggie Murphy, and it doesn't spoil the storyline to say that she survived the encounter with the iceberg. Another protagonist is Maggie's great-grand-daughter Grace, starting out on a career in journalism in the US. There are other people in the story, some close to Maggie, others who came in peripherally but in some cases became very important.

It may be the fact that Hazel was raised in Yorkshire which gives her a grasp of old rural life, but she captures in 'The Girl' a very believable depiction of a Mayo village in the early years of the 20th century, the hopes and fears of its people, and the small details of life at the time.

The book is written in a number of formats, flashbacks and flashforwards, letters from a lover, Maggie's private journal, actual telegrams from the ship. Through them all is the very clear detail of many aspects of the Titanic and its maiden voyage destined to be its final one. It is detail that only someone who has gathered a treasure chest of knowledge over many years could credibly provide.

'The Girl who Came Home' is a small treasury of love stories, among other things. It is primarily a woman's book, the main characters women, the perspective the particular romantic one from that side of the gender spectrum. But it is also a story of human journey, and the search for meaning and fulfillment on that journey.

It's a story well told, with some unexpected twists as it works its way to conclusion. It is only available in Kindle form on the Amazon website. But even if you don't have a Kindle, you can download it to your computer or your smartphone on the relevant free apps. It's worth doing, and worth reading.

In this centenary year of the Titanic tragedy, Hazel Gaynor has successfully reached a major moment on her own journey as a writer. We'll be reading more of them in coming years.


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Review: Three Words for Goodbye

Historical Romance. Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb.

I have a running joke with Hazel Gaynor, that her books reduce me to tears, writes Brian Byrne. They do. Because though romance and historical fiction are not my normal read, I’m nevertheless a sucker for a happy, or sad, storyline. I’m a secret softie, really, even if a complex political thriller would be my normal books preference.

When Hazel and her sometimes writing partner Heather Webb get together to write a book, there is then a pair of them conspiring to get my face wet. With their latest co-production, Three Words for Goodbye, they did it again.

None of the foregoing is really relevant to the book, which is another professional and absorbing production from the Gaynor-Webb catalogue. Just as are the Gaynor solus volumes which have annexed an ever-increasing space on my bookshelf since Hazel started it all in 2012 with The Girl Who Came Home.

History and the world wars have been a rich vein of inspiration for her, and for the writing duo. In this story together they bring the dark tapestry of looming WW2 into a human perspective through the eyes of two sisters from America, Clara and Madeleine. They are put together on a journey through Europe by their grandmother, who wants them by proxy to tidy up affairs from her own youth. And in the process to hopefully learn more about each other. It would be unfair to say more about the story, and risk delivering spoilers. It is nicely complicated in many emotional ways, so read the book yourself to get the full enjoyment of the skilful way a short few weeks in the lives of these two young women are put together.

In addition to entertaining, Three Words for Goodbye addresses social perspectives which, while of the story's time, can still resonate more than eight decades on. The politics of the late 1930s, the business practices, the international warmongering, all have their parallels today. As do still — admittedly to less extent in more enlightened parts of the world — the constrained place and perception of women. The existence of role models who influence their possible alternative futures also remains important for women today. And how the revelations from someone else’s hidden past can change destinies is a constant in life's experience, for both women and men.

This is a 'lockdown book' and I’m fascinated about how Hazel and Heather must have put this together from their covid-restricted working desks on two sides of the Atlantic. Did each take the role of a different sister? And if so, which did who? I will in due course ask. Meantime, the deft merging of their protagonists' personal experiences in the gathering international gloom and doom is an exemplar of how properly to meld fiction and history.

Three Words for Goodbye made me once again steal time from my other activities in order to keep reading it. At the same time not wanting to reach the end. Not because I knew there would be tears, rather that when you’re enjoying something, you don’t want it to finish.

Three Words for Goodbye is available locally in Woodbine Books, and in all good bookshops here and abroad. A perfect gift for Christmas, for yourself or for someone else you know will appreciate the telling of a good historical romance story.

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The Last Lifeboat, Kilcullen launch today

It's just 11 years since Hazel Gaynor's first book, The Girl Who Came Home, launched on the Amazon Kindle platform and quickly became a best seller there, writes Brian Byrne. Four years later, having been picked up by HarperCollins, she had two New York Times Best Seller novels on bookshelves both sides of the Atlantic and a new deal with her publisher. Two days ago, her latest fictional exploration of a true story, The Last Lifeboat, hit the shelves, bringing her solus novels to seven, plus three co-written with her friend Heather Webb, and a contribution to an important collection of short stories based around WW1.

By any measure in the world of writers and publishing, Hazel's own story is one of success to be admired, and maybe envied by very many other story-tellers struggling to have their voices heard in a precarious and even scary career choice. But for those who know her, it's a success based on two notions — hard work and dedication to detail. Underpinned by a consuming curiosity about near-past historical events and an urge to tell the stories of the ordinary people affected by them.

Hazel's first book involved a lifeboat from the Titanic which had sunk in the Atlantic in 1912. Her latest has her story in a lifeboat once more in the Atlantic, but this time in 1940, following the sinking by a German U-boat of a ship carrying child evacuees on their way to Canada. An episode that actually happened, that made headlines and inflicted terrible tragedy on families who had entrusted their loved little ones to the risks of wartime sea travel in order to save them from Hitler's anticipated invasion of England.

The core of the story is about eight days spent in the lifeboat by a number of those children, their volunteer escort 'auntie', and some sailors who had survived the sinking. Eight days of cold, discomfort, indignity, hunger and terror. Of wondering if they would survive. Of not knowing if anyone was even looking for them, a tiny bobbing flotsam of humankind in a vast and tumultuous ocean. As readers, we don't spend all our time with them — the author chapters how those in the little group came to be there, where they came from, who they had left behind when they started out on their voyage of sadness, peril and hope.

This is Hazel Gaynor's key skill as a story-teller. Each of the characters we come to know in their ordinariness made extraordinary by their circumstances. The descriptions around them we can feel, we know them at least in part from our own lives. From the smell of scones in the kitchen of one family to the grief of a mother left widowed to bring up her children on her own. The importance of a winning marble to a little boy. The heartache of entrusting little ones to a stranger's care for a future unknown. The lucky charm of a white bird feather. The need to flail out in anger at faceless officialdom when feeling powerless in the midst of tragedy. 

This author's other ability is to bring out details of time and period that will not be familiar to today's readers, the work of a skilled historical novelist. I wasn't aware of the transatlantic evacuation of children during WW2. Nor did I know of the 'Mass-Observation Diarist' programme whereby individuals were encouraged to send in their daily feelings about wartime life, to be archived — a Facebook of its time? She uses extracts from these to punctuate her book and her characters' stories, to momentarily bring us to the realities of wartime for others outside the story's space.

Hazel Gaynor doesn't write the kind of dramatic thriller that would be my normal kind of book to escape into. But she has always come up with a tale that has to be read to the end, that every page finished insists it be turned immediately. Because we just need to know, what happens next? I read The Last Lifeboat in two (and a bit) sessions. Which says it all.

The Kilcullen launch of The Last Lifeboat is today, Saturday 10 June 2023, at 3.30pm in Woodbine Books.

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How Hazel Gaynor wrote her latest book

With her latest book launching in Ireland tomorrow, in advance of UK and US launches, how local author Hazel Gaynor came to write The Bird in the Bamboo Cage is featured in this week's Kildare Nationalist.

The book is a novelised version of the real story of how a group of English and American schoolchildren and their teachers coped with being interned by the Japanese during WW2.

Hazel's previous books have been on the best-seller lists in the US and in this part of the world, and her latest can be acquired through local bookshops from tomorrow, including Woodbine Books in Kilcullen.

LISTEN: Kilcullen Diary's review of The Bird in The Bamboo Cage.

LISTEN: Hazel Gaynor talks about The Bird in The Bamboo Cage.

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The Cottingley Secret launched at Woodbine Books

Hazel Gaynor and your editor. Pic by Tony Keane.

Your editor has a problem. How to report on something he was involved in? Because normally I'm comfortably in the background, on my own side of the camera, making my own observations on other people's doings.

"This is what it's like when you point your camera at me and I haven't done my makeup," Hazel Gaynor said with a clearly satisfied grin as we were both lined up by photographer Tony Keane in Woodbine Books last evening. "Get used to it."

Hopefully I won't have to. I was in the front line only because Hazel had done me the honour of asking me to launch her latest book, The Cottingley Secret, in Kilcullen. Which was also why people were commenting all evening on how well I looked. Just because I very rarely wear a tie? Oh, all right, I do generally dress down rather than up … it helps me merge into the background.

Anyhow, I was very glad to be able to speak about Hazel's fourth novel, and to speak well of it because it is a beautiful book in every way. I have previously reviewed it, so won't go into any more detail here.

But to briefly reprise some of my thoughts from last night, I like Hazel's books because they are stories well told about real happenings, mostly from around a hundred years ago, with her own fictional characters woven in to bring those stories to life in a way that we as readers can feel part of. And she does it without bringing in violence, or graphic sex, or any of the coarser elements which seem to be required to construct a best-seller today. Apparently it works for her, because her books are international best-sellers.

Hazel also has a command of words and language which makes her books and their stories inter-generational. The Cottingley Secret, for instance, can be appreciated by a reader in early teens as much as by a septuagenarian like myself. And by every demographic in between. Being able to create a book like that is a special gift.

Hazel spoke a little last night about herself and her family's early days in Kilcullen when they arrived in 2005, not knowing anybody here then but now with friends across the community, including on the sidelines of the GAA and rugby pitches. She outlined her current life as a writer, 'commuting to the attic' every day and often wondering if what she is doing at the time is any good. And she reiterated her gratitude to her family for 'putting up with her' when she is in writing mode, and to her fellow-writer friends who give amazing support. She spoke too of the background to The Cottingley Secret, and how writing the novel allowed her to bring together her original home in Yorkshire and her place today in Ireland.

The launch was special too because it was in a small town bookshop which will shortly be celebrating its first anniversary. Dawn Behan and Aidan Cunnane are, very bravely, living their own dream in a business which might seem — and probably is — a scary undertaking. But which has not just survived, and offers an extraordinary selection of books for its size, but that also lights up the village grown bigger of Kilcullen in a way which is a quantum beyond being a mere business. That they had a multiple New York Times best selling author to launch last night, along with several other established writers in the packed bookshop, won't do their business any harm at all.

Most of all though, it was a night for celebrating local success and support beyond it. Because all of us are the better off for Hazel and her fellow writers. And for Dawn and Aidan (and their multi-talented colleague Saoirse, lateley even a barista) and their independent bookshop colleagues. And beyond them for the publishers who continue to invest in the physical book in hand in a digital era which has not, despite all forecasts, managed to crush the attraction of a good story in words on a printed page.

A lovely night it was.

Book your space for tonight's Woodbine interview with Hazel Gaynor

Hazel and Dawn getting ready for the interview.

If you want some book suggestions for Christmas, you couldn't do better than tune in this evening to the streamed interview by Woodbine Books with local best selling author Hazel Gaynor, writes Brian Byrne.

The interview will be streamed via Zoom at 7pm this evening, and free access can gained by following the Eventbrite link below to book tickets in advance. In addition to talking about the writing life, Dawn Behan and Hazel will discuss the strong Irish literary scene, from writers to bookshops, as well as Hazel's new book The Bird in the Bamboo Cage, launched in the middle of lockdown (and just this week announced on the shortlist for this year's An Post Irish Book Awards in the Popular Fiction category).

For those who want to get ahead of the queues this year, Hazel will then give some of her book recommendations for this Christmas.

Tonight's event is in association with Antonia's Bookstore in Trim, Co Meath and The Maynooth Bookshop. Tickets to view the streamed event are free but places must be reserved. There is also an option to purchase a signed book with your ticket, either for collection from the bookshop or to be posted within Ireland. Tickets can be reserved here. 



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