To the Lighthouses, Writers

What is it about lighthouses and writers? My blog title is a riff on Virginia Woolf’s incomparable To the Lighthouse that I first read in high school. Just in the last few years, we’ve seen The Light Between Oceans, The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter,...

The Wages of Violence

The third volume in my First World War and 1920s historical fiction trilogy, No Hero’s Welcome, comes out in a few weeks. This book, set almost entirely in Ireland from the Easter Rising in 1916 through the end of the Civil War in 1923, completes the story of...

A Terrible Beauty

If you’re interested in anything to do with Ireland—beyond drinking that repulsive dyed-green American beer on the 17th of March—you probably know that Ireland is smack in the middle of the centenary celebration of the endgame in the centuries-long struggle for Irish...

Care and Feeding of Characters

I’m still in the afterglow of the blue-ribbon win by my first novel, None of Us the Same, at last week’s writers’ conference in the Great Northwest. Let me just own up. Writers are all Sally Fields when it comes to awards—“You like me! You REALLY like me!!!” I am no...

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