All the van Lonkhuyzens for their support and for being brilliant grandparents to my three children. Even though you have seen your grandparenting duties literally multiply over the last five years, thank you so much for all that you do for us.
To my friends: I don’t want to mention names because I will leave somebody out but you know who you are. Thank you for the laughs (and sometimes inspiration)! A few of you have some exciting things happening this year and I’m looking forward to sharing them with you. Love you all x
A special mention has to go to Margaret Scott who I’ve only come to know through writing but I think I can safely say that our friendship transcends just writing. Thank you for being an amazing support through the ups and downs and for always being at the end of the phone for the reassurance. Especially your encouragement when I struggled at several stages of writing this book.
To the booksellers who are fighting the good fight. I will never tire of walking into a bookshop and seeing a book with my name on the cover on the shelves. It still feels as good as the first time and I realise how privileged I am to experience this. To the book-bloggers and reviewers who have been so supportive of me to date and also to Vanessa at www.writing.ie who is a fabulous support of Irish authors and emerging writers.
Lastly, to all my readers who pick up my book from the shelves and especially the people who take the time out from their lives to get in touch with me about my books. It never ceases to amaze, humble and make me pinch myself how lucky I am to be doing this.
With much love,
Caroline x
In A Moment
Adam & Emma are a couple being torn apart by their past. Their relationship is only held together by a thread. As their marriage disintegrates around them, Adam tries desperately to salvage it – while Emma does everything in her power, not only to avoid the issue, but to avoid him.
But what has brought them to this point? Why is Emma traumatised by the very sight of him? And why is Adam having recurring nightmares?
Jean McParland has long been living her own nightmare, battling with her son Paul whose violent outbursts have terrorised her and his younger siblings in their own home. Torn between her love for her eldest son and fears for the other children, Jean has shied away from taking decisive action . . . while their lives continued to spin out of control.
Then, in just one moment, Adam, Emma and Jean’s lives became inextricably linked and were changed forever.
Read In A Moment Now
My Sister's Child
My Sister's Child is the story of two sisters, and one huge question.
Jo is the elder sister, responsible and hardworking. Isla is carefree and has always avoided being tied down. The sisters have always had a strained relationship, but when Isla asks Jo for something that rocks the very foundations of the family that Jo has worked so hard to have, she is horrified. And, as Isla persists in her pleas, Jo fears she will lose the one thing she holds most dearly.
Thought-provoking and compelling, this is a layered and moving story of sisterhood, love and lies and the finely-woven link between nature and nurture that will challenge the way you think about motherhood.
Read My Sister's Child Now
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bookclub questions
1. Did you feel empathy for Ella’s situation initially? What about afterwards?
2. There is strong use of imagery of the sea in Ella’s story, specifically her Martello Tower home situated on the rocks in Dublin Bay. Do you think that was intentional and does it add to the story?
3. Conor and Ella have been friends for a long time and share a close bond. Do you think friendships between men and women can ever be truly platonic?
4. Rachel and Marcus have a seemingly perfect relationship except for the fact that he doesn’t want to have any more children. He is adamant that it is unfair to bring a child into the world when he doesn’t want it. Do you agree with this belief? Do you think he should have relented so he could hold on to Rachel?
5. What did you think of John-Paul’s relationship with his son?
6. Do you agree with John-Paul’s solicitor when he argues in court that society is unfair to fathers, especially unmarried fathers, and has a natural bias towards women as mother figures?
7. Ella and her sister Andrea have very different attitudes to their mother’s desertion of their family as children. Why do you think this is?
8. Do you agree with Ella’s assertion that ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’ i.e. that we must suffer the consequences of our actions?
9. Rachel mentions that you wouldn’t do her job if you didn’t have hope that people can change. How important is it to have this attitude in our everyday lives?
10. Who saves whom in this novel?
11. Which character do you think grew the most over the course of the story and why?
12. What do you think the future holds for Jack?
author interview
Where did the idea for the storyline come from?
A question that writers get asked a lot is ‘where do your ideas come from?’ and sometimes it can be hard to pinpoint exactly where they originate. In general, I think writers are always switched on. We are intuitively soaking up ideas all the time. With Into The Night Sky, I heard a piece on the Ray Darcy Radio Show about a woman who had found a Chinese paper lantern in her garden one night and inside it there was a love letter. The woman was trying to trace the person who wrote it, as it was obviously very personal to them, which was why she contacted the show. This story stayed in my head and I had an image of this beautiful lantern, glowing orange and sailing majestically up over a background of a navy-blue sky and at the same time I imagined this grieving man and the story came from there.
For Jack I had this image of a precocious boy from a disadvantaged area in my head for a while. Initially Conor jumps to the conclusion that Jack is going to be another troublemaker like the other children who live near Haymarket Books. Then as a friendship develops between them people automatically jump to conclusions that there is something untoward going on. With Jack’s storyline I wanted to explore further how we prejudge people every day and form often incorrect preconceptions about them. In a day and age where people are fearful of predators it is too easy to automatically assume the worst about everyone. As a mother myself, I am guilty of prejudging people when I hear of an adult befriending an unrelated child, especially if that adult is male. I wanted to turn the preconceptions on their head and show that theirs is a story of true friendship. What is special about Conor and Jack’s friendship is that as much as Conor helps Jack come to terms with his mother’s imminent death, Jack helps Conor to accept what has happened to Leni and he provides a chink of light in a very dark period in Conor’s life. They both help each other without realising it.
As I was exploring the theme of friendship further between Conor and Jack I wanted to contrast it with a very different kind of friendship, namely the friendship between Conor and Ella.
I initially hadn’t intended on Ella being such a big character in the story but I kept having this image of a woman undergoing intense personal suffering and not being able to cope and it wouldn’t leave me. I read about a woman in a magazine who was very well off but she was addicted to shoplifting. Financially, she obviously didn’t need to shoplift but it was an impulse that she couldn’t control. I think there is very little awareness of this problem and the reasons aren’t properly understood. Even when I was doing my research I kept finding conflicting information on it. With Ella I wanted to explore the very fine link between good mental health and instability, the knock-on impact it can have in other
areas of our lives.
Regarding the custody battle between John-Paul and Tina, there has been a lot of media coverage in recent times of the rights of unmarried fathers in Ireland. In Ireland at present if a parent isn’t married then the father has no automatic guardianship rights unless he specifically applies to the courts to become a legal guardian which is the situation that John-Paul finds himself in. Originally when I started writing the story, the role of the social worker was only meant to be a sideline character. I didn’t intend to have Rachel being so prominent in the book but as often is the case when you start writing, characters take on a life of their own and she was one of those. I realised that by giving Rachel a storyline of her own it was an opportunity to show the brave and important work that social workers do and how difficult it must be to do that job every day.
Your novels all have a ‘what would you do?’ moral dilemma at their heart. Did you set out to be an issue-led writer?
No, I didn’t actually, but I can certainly see this is the route that I am going down and I’m happy with that as these are the books I like to read myself. Both In a Moment and The Last Goodbye and now Into the Night Sky have big issues at their heart. My plots usually come to me with a central issue or theme and then the characters usually come after. I think there are lots of situations in life where there are no easy answers. As a fiction writer I have the benefit of being able to explore both sides of a dilemma. Sometimes when I am writing, I ask myself ‘What would I do in that situation?’ but then when I think about it from the other point of view, I can often empathise with that viewpoint too.
In general I am interested in back-story, the childhoods that shape the people we are today and family relationships.
Addiction features prominently in the book both with John-Paul and Tina who are recovering drug addicts and then also with Ella’s kleptomania. Why did you choose this theme to explore?
I think addiction is a very worthy theme in its own right. It is a personal tragedy. It is horrifying to watch someone lose everything they care about because they are overpowered by a synthetic substance or a damaging behaviour. The addiction is always the master to which all other things come second place. Some people can be strong enough to overcome its calling, such as Tina because of her love for her unborn son Jack. However, it also destroys so many lives such as in both Ella’s and John-Paul’s storyline.
Did you have a favourite character when writing Into The Night Sky?
I actually fell in love with the character of Jack. I loved his spirit and tenacity. As I was writing the story I often found myself thinking of him as if he was a real child in my life. For example, I was in a department store one day and I saw something about the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, who, as you know if you’ve read the book, Jack is a big fan of. I found myself thinking ‘Oh, Jack would love that!’ and I had to remind myself that he was fictional. So he was very real to me and I will definitely miss him but who knows, I may revisit him as an adult down the line in a future book to see how his life has turned out.
Do you plan carefully or just see where the writing takes you?
I really, really wish that I were a better planner. It catches me out on every book and I always say next time I will plan more first but I just can’t do it no matter how much I try. I’ve come to accept that my brain just isn’t wired that way for some reason. I will usually start with a rough plot outline and the main characters. I usually have the title as well which for me seems to be crucial to forming the story in my head. Personally speaking, I don’t really get to know the story until I get to the end of the first draft and then I go back over it again several times to bring it all together.
Do you have your own writing rituals?
Not really. I tend to write whenever I can grab a few minutes between family life or when my children are in bed, so I don’t have the luxury of being choosy. Often I write in coffee shops at weekends and I quite like that. Sometimes it’s nice to be immersed amongst other people – the background noise can be soothing for a change as writing can often be a lonely experience.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m in the middle of my fourth book, which at the moment I have entitled My Sister’s Child. It is the story of the relationship between two sisters Jo and Isla. Fourteen years before Isla donated eggs to her older sister Jo who was undergoing fertility problems. Two embryos were made, one of which was implanted into Jo resulting in her daughter Realtín, and the other was frozen in storage.
Fast forward to the present day where Isla is experiencing infertility problems too, and with no options left to conceive a biological child of her own, she decides to ask Jo if she can have her last remaining embryo from storage.
The story deals the dilemma faced by Jo, who doesn’t want Isla to have the embryo even though genetically it was conceived using Isla’s egg. It focuses on the tension between Jo and Isla and the ethical dilemmas surrounding egg donation. The central theme is ‘nature versus nurture’. I must say I have really enjoyed writing it so far and it will be published in 2015.
Into the Night Sky Page 33