“Something told me the time had come to call in a couple of favors. Charles Aukin’s a decent enough old skin in his own way. And, God knows, those de Lancys owe this place a lot.”
It had taken a couple of drinks, he said, but in the end they’d come to an agreement. As a memorial to his deceased wife, the last of the de Lancys, Charles was presenting The Carrick Psalter to the people of Finfarran.
Hanna looked at Fury blankly. Delighted by the effect of his announcement, Fury scratched The Divil with his boot.
“No, wait now, there’s more to come and it’s even better.”
The Psalter itself, he said, was only half of the gift. Charles was establishing a trust fund for its preservation and display. And the terms of the trust would stipulate where exactly it was to be housed.
“In Lissbeg Library, as part of a newly developed, council-funded social amenities center. Situated in the old convent.”
“You mean that the terms of the bequest require that the council adopt our proposal?”
“Oh, I think you’ll find that pretty soon it’ll be the council’s proposal, not yours. Just as the HoHo app will become The Edge of the World website, so you’d better warn young Ferdia to drive a hard bargain for his work.”
“No but, hang on, just a minute, what about last night’s vote?”
“Sure, no better man than a county councillor for a bit of backped’ling. This is an offer they’re not going to refuse. Do you think the government would let them? They’re getting a world-class museum piece and the price of a place to house it. They’ll bite Charles Aukin’s arm off and give him the thanks of the nation.”
The Divil’s legs scrabbled in the ashes; he was chasing rats in his dreams.
Hanna gazed at Fury, unable to take things in. He leaned forward and placed the lectern in her hands.
“Mind you, I know the kind of nonsense the insurance lads will insist on. So I added my own stipulation before Charles and I shook hands. Whatever class of a bulletproof glass case that book ends up in, you’ll display it on my lectern or we’ll have it back.” Cocking his head, Fury winked at her. “Tell Conor that if he wears his motorbike gloves he can turn a page over each day.”
Hanna sat with the lectern in her lap, gazing into the fire. After a few minutes Fury stood up and poked The Divil with his toe. The little dog rolled over and shook himself vigorously, scattering ashes on the hearthstone. Fury looked at Hanna in disapproval.
“That fire wants a decent brush and a proper shovel.”
For a moment Hanna expected him to produce them from a pocket. Instead he threw his head back and laughed at her.
“Ah no, Miss Casey, this one’s your problem. I’ll be here tomorrow to get on with the extension. But as of today I’ve given your house back to you.”
Shading her eyes from a flood of sunlight, Hanna stepped over the threshold. This was her field above the Atlantic, bounded by stone walls and ready to be tilled. Above her, the turquoise sky reflected the color of the ocean. She had a stone slab for a doorstep and the land at her feet sloped down to a high cliff’s edge. Beyond that was a broad ledge clustered with sea pinks and a sheer drop to the dancing waves below. At her back, the quiet house stood like a sanctuary. Before her lay a future filled with hope.
When Fury had left she’d poured herself another bowl of coffee, relishing the feeling of warmth through the worn glaze. Now bees hummed in the tasseled grass as she carried it down the field. As she reached the wall at the edge of the cliff, a seagull swooped by overhead. Holding the bowl carefully, Hanna climbed the stile and sat on the bench beyond the wall. There was a flash of color as a dragonfly landed on a flower. Millions of small, noisy lives were being lived out all around her and the stones against which she had set her back were warm.
Breathing in deeply, Hanna thought of the Psalter. A deer ran through a forest, its feet and flanks touched with gold. Farther down the page it was standing by a fountain, and acorns hung from its antlers. Waterspouts had fluted tops like trumpets; and there within the painted words on the parchment were the mountains she crossed in the van each week on her drive to Ballyfin. Tomorrow when she went back to work, the library would be crowded. Darina Kelly would turn up with her grubby toddler, Conor on his Vespa, and Pat Fitz with her computer class of seniors. Across the road in his butcher shop, Ger Fitz would gnash his teeth when he heard about the Psalter. She supposed that Charles Aukin’s gift to Finfarran had probably lost Ger a fortune. But Pat, who would never know, would never miss it. And since the tickets Pat had bought to fly them to Canada were a bargain, Ger would have to take the rough along with the smooth.
Smiling, Hanna tipped her head back and listened to the sound of the ocean. Jazz was alive, the library was saved, and one day soon, by the horse trough on Broad Street, she knew that she’d encounter Brian Morton. In the distance the horizon was a silver streak shining between turquoise and indigo. And the taste of windblown salt on her lips was mixed with the honey scent of flowers.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to my editor Hannah Robinson and her colleagues at Harper Perennial, New York, who have worked so meticulously on this US edition of The Library at the Edge of the World, and to Markus Hoffmann at Regal Hoffmann & Associates.
I also remain very grateful to all at Hachette Books Ireland, and, as ever, to my agent, Gaia Banks, at Sheil Land Associates, UK.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
* * *
Meet Felicity Hayes-McCoy
About the Book
* * *
The Story Behind The Library at the Edge of the World
Read On
* * *
Books and Authors from The Library at the Edge of the World
Have You Read? More by Felicity Hayes-McCoy
About the Author
Meet Felicity Hayes-McCoy
I’ve been a professional writer all my working life and a reader for longer than I can remember. Along the way, my projects have included nonfiction titles; children’s books; original TV dramas and contributions to series (including Ballykissangel, the BBC’s smash-hit series, set in Ireland); radio soap opera, features, documentaries, and plays; screenplays; a couple of opera libretti; and interactive multimedia. But—given that my childhood was spent largely behind sofas, reading stories—I suspect it was inevitable that, sooner or later, I’d come to write a series of books about books, with a protagonist who’s a librarian.
I was born in Dublin, Ireland, studied English and Irish language and literature at university, and emigrated to London in my early twenties. I built a successful career there, as an actress and then as a writer: in fact, it was books that led me to the stage in the first place, the wonderful Blue Door Theatre series by the English children’s author Pamela Brown. Back in the 1960s Dublin was famous for its musty, quirky secondhand bookshops beside the River Liffey My father, who was a historian, was unable to pass the stalls that stood outside them without stopping and never came home without a book or two, for himself or one of the family. I still have the Nelson edition of The Swish of the Curtain that he bought me in 1963, with the price and the date penciled inside in his careful, elegant handwriting. It cost him ninepence, which I’m not sure he’d have spent so cheerfully if he’d known that his gift was going to make me an actress, not an academic. Still, I like to think he’d have been pleased to know that, thirty years later, as a writer in London, I successfully pitched and dramatized the Blue Door Theatre series for BBC Radio.
To a certain extent, my Finfarran Peninsula series has a little of my own story in it. Though Hanna Casey’s is a rural background, like me she grew up in Ireland and moved to London where she married. In 1986, I met and married the English opera director Wilf Judd, then artistic director of the Garden Venture at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Unlike Hanna and her rat-fink husband Malcolm, though, Wilf and I met as colleagues, and we continue to work together, sharing our love of litera
ture, theatre, ecology, and design, and dividing our life and work between a flat in inner-city London and a stone house at the western end of Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula.
In my memoir The House on an Irish Hillside I write about our Irish home on this real peninsula which, while geographically similar, is culturally quite different from my fictional Finfarran. One of the defining differences is that our West Kerry home is in what is called a Gaeltacht—an area where Irish, not English, is the language of everyday life. Gaeltacht, pronounced “Gwale-tockt,” comes from the word Gaeilge, which is often translated into English as “Gaelic.” And “Gaelic,” incidentally, is not a word ever used in Ireland for the Irish language!
I first visited the western end of the Dingle Peninsula at age seventeen, not just to further my Irish language studies but because of a growing fascination with folklore. I was seeking something I’d glimpsed in my childhood in Dublin, a city kid curled on my country granny’s bed listening to stories. I’d begun to understand it as a student, ploughing through books and exams. And, on that first visit, I began to recognize something that, all my life, I’d taken for granted. The effect of thinking in two languages.
Since then, partly through writing The Library at the Edge of the World, I’ve come to realize more deeply that my earliest experience of storytelling came from my grandmother’s Irish-language oral tradition; and that memories of that inheritance, married to my love of Ireland’s English-language literary tradition, have shaped me as a writer.
When Wilf and I first decided to divide our life between two countries, we weren’t escaping from an English city to a rural Irish idyll. Life can be stressful anywhere in the world, and human nature is universal. So, for us, living in two places isn’t about running from one and escaping to the other. It’s about heightening our awareness and appreciation of both.
There’s a story about the legendary Irish hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his warriors hunting the hills of Ireland. They chase the deer from dawn to dusk and then gather to eat, drink, and make music. As they sit by the fire, between tunes and talk, Fionn puts a question to his companions: “What is the best music in the world?” One man says it’s the cry of the cuckoo. Another says it’s the ring of a spear on a shield. Someone suggests the baying of a pack of deerhounds, or the laughter of a willing girl. “Nothing wrong with any of them,” says Fionn, “but there’s better music.” So they ask him what it is and he gives them his answer. “The best music in the world,” he says, “is the music of what happens.”
Each time life and work take me from Ireland to London and back again, there’s a brief window—maybe just on the journey from the airport—when everything I see and hear becomes heightened. For an author, that’s gold dust. Focus sharpens, bringing with it a new sense of what it is to be alive. As my brain shifts from one language to another, I discover new word patterns, and reappraise those that are familiar. The contrasting rhythms of the two places provide endless entrance points for creativity; and, for me, the universality of human experience, seen against different backgrounds, has always been the music of what happens.
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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 recognitio
n. 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.
Read On
BOOKS AND AUTHORS FROM THE LIBRARY AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
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Hanna Casey’s love affair with reading began in a public library, where she first found a world of possibilities in a book. Like all the best experiences in life, it was personal, empowering, and just a little wacky . . . and it led to a lifetime’s exploration of all that libraries have to offer.
Here—gleaned from The Library at the Edge of the World—are some titles and authors that you yourself might like to explore and enjoy.
(By the by, you won’t find God’s Garden, A Long Way to LA, or Helpful Hints for Home Owners, though! Like Hanna, Lissbeg Library, Finfarran, and all its inhabitants, they are imaginary. As, of course, is The Carrick Psalter.)
Books
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Beowulf
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
The Canterbury Tales
Charlotte’s Web
The Charwoman’s Daughter
Circle of Friends
The Collected Poems of Edith Sitwell
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Cranford
The Dance Music of Ireland
Early Irish History and Mythology
Elizabethan Lyrics
The Female Eunuch
The Gruffalo
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Heart of Darkness
A House Divided
The Library at the Edge of the World Page 29