Contemporary Authors

• In the Beginning J. Cape (London, England), 1997
• A Name for Himself J. Cape (London, England), 1998
• The Years That Followed Pan Macmillan (London, England), 2016

1. The years that followed LCCN 2016031404 Type of material Book Personal name Dunne, Catherine, 1954- author. Main title The years that followed / Catherine Dunne. Edition First Touchstone hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Touchstone, 2016. Description 336 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781501135668 (hardback) 9781501147241 (trade paperback) CALL NUMBER PR6054.U5536 Y43 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Lost between : writings on displacement LCCN 2015464093 Type of material Book Main title Lost between : writings on displacement / Mia Gallagher [and fourteen others] ; foreword by Catherine Dunne and Federica Sgaggio. Published/Produced County Dublin, Republic of Ireland : New Island, 2015. Description vii, 140 pages ; 20 cm ISBN 9781848404632 (pbk.) 1848404638 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2016 013082 CALL NUMBER PN6120.2 .L675 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2) 3. A name for himself LCCN 99176338 Type of material Book Personal name Dunne, Catherine, 1954- Main title A name for himself / Catherine Dunne. Published/Created London : J. Cape, 1998. Description 278 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 0224050907 : Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 4. In the beginning LCCN 97201001 Type of material Book Personal name Dunne, Catherine, 1954- Main title In the beginning / Catherine Dunne. Published/Created London : J. Cape, 1997. Description 282 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 0224044265 (pbk.) 0224042890 (cased) Shelf Location FLS2014 124228 CALL NUMBER PR6054.U5536 I5 1997 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1)

• The Walled Garden - 2000 Pan, London
• Another Kind of Life - 2003 Picador, New York
• Something Like Love - 2006 Macmillan, London
• At a Time Like This - 2008 Pan, London
• Set In Stone - 2009 Pan, London
• Missing Julia - 2010 Pan, London
• The Things We Know Now - 2013 Pan, London
• An Unconsidered People: The Irish in Sixties London - 2003 New Island, Dublin

• Catherine Dunne - http://www.catherinedunneauthor.com/catherine-dunne-biography/

  Most writers serve a very long apprenticeship.

  I became a fulltime writer in 1995, but I’ve been writing ever since I can remember. From short – very short – stories as a child to the usual excruciating poetry as a teenager: I’ve probably being putting words on paper for almost half a century now. What a thought.

  As a child, it took me a few years to learn that there was a difference between reading and writing. For me, if you loved books, then of course you were going to try and write your own. But that was an almost impossible ambition in the Ireland where I grew up. I did the next best thing: the thing that kept me closest to books. I became a teacher, and I taught, very happily, for seventeen years. I loved teaching and still very much enjoy the Creative Writing workshops that I often facilitate.

  But writing increasingly became a compulsion, almost an obsession. Nothing else satisfied in the way that writing satisfied, and so I continued to attempt poetry, short stories, non-fiction essays, honing my craft, serving my apprenticeship, until I finally finished my first novel, In the Beginning.

  In the Beginning was published in 1997 and was very well-received, both critically and popularly. It was translated into several languages and went on to be shortlisted for the ‘Bancarella’ – the Italian booksellers’ prize.

  A Name for Himself followed a year later, and was short listed for the Kerry Fiction Prize.

  Between 2000 and 2014, I have published seven further novels: The Walled Garden, Another Kind of Life, Something Like Love, At a Time Like This, Set in Stone, Missing Julia and The Things We Know Now.

  My non-fiction book, An Unconsidered People was published in 2003.

  I’ve also written short stories and non-fiction pieces for various publications, among them Moments, Travelling Light, and Irish Girls about Town.

  I receive a lot of requests to discuss various aspects of the creative process: the role played by inspiration, imagination, dedication and craft. I can’t answer all of these questions individually, so part of this website has been dedicated to a ‘Readers’ Forum’ in order to attempt to answer the most frequently-asked questions.

  My facebook page is where I post regular updates – you are very welcome to join me there.

  Please feel free also to send any questions you may have to the dedicated email address below.
  I look forward to hearing from you!

  With all best wishes,

  Catherine

  CONTACT: catherine@catherinedunneauthor.com

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Dunne_(writer)

  Catherine Dunne (born 1954) is an Irish writer. She was born in Dublin and studied English and Spanish at Trinity College, Dublin, before becoming a teacher.[1] In 2013, she was awarded the Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction for The Things We Know,[2] which was published in Italy as Quel che ora sappiamo.[3]

  Published books[edit]
  As of July 2016, Dunne had written ten novels and a work of non-fiction.[4][5] Her first novel, published in 1997, was In the Beginning, which was described in Publishers Weekly as "an auspicious debut".[6]

  Non-fiction
  An Unconsidered People: The Irish in Sixties London (New Island, 2003)
  Novels
  In the Beginning (Jonathan Cape, 1997)
  A Name for Himself (Jonathan Cape, 1998)
  The Walled Garden (Pan, 2000)
  Another Kind of Life (Picador, 2003)
  Something Like Love (Macmillan, 2006)
  At a Time Like This (Pan, 2007)
  Set in Stone (Pan, 2009)
  Missing Julia (Pan, 2010)
  The Things We Know Now (Pan, 2013)
  The Years That Followed (Macmillan, 2016)[5]

• Pan Macmillan - https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/catherine-dunne

  Catherine Dunne is the author of eight novels including most recently Missing Julia, Something Like Love, At a Time Like This and Set in Stone. She has also written about Irish immigration in An Unconsidered People. All of her work has been published to both critical and popular acclaim. The novels have struck a chord in several countries and have been translated into many languages and optioned for film. Catherine Dunne lives near Dublin.

• Express - http://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/181351/Catherine-Dunne-Tragedy-inspired-me-to-write-for-women

  Catherine Dunne: Tragedy inspired me to write for women

  CATHERINE DUNNE found solace in writing after losing a child and almost losing her own life. She tells Charlotte Heathcote how Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's wife also found comfort in her fiction.

  PUBLISHED: 00:00, Wed, Jun 16, 2010

  6

  Catherine Dunne has completed her seventh book Set In Stone
  Catherine Dunne has completed her seventh book Set In Stone []
  IT WAS when a worst nightmare came true that Catherine Dunne realised life was too short and too precious for compromise, prompting her to stop teaching and start writing. In 1991 she lost her unborn child and in the process almost died herself.

  "Writing saved my sanity," she says.

  As her seventh novel, Set In Stone, is published later this month, Dunne's success proves she made a wise decision during those dark days.

  During the final fortnight of her second pregnancy she suffered an abruption, where the placenta fell away from the uterus, causing a major haemorrhage. "They couldn't save my son, " explains the Dublin-based author.

  "It was pretty tough going saving me. If I hadn't lived as close to the hospital as I did, I wouldn't be speaking to you today. I was given eight litres of blood that night and used up the entire stock at the hospital.

  "One of the images that stayed with me was of the doctors trying to defrost more blood. Obviously it was a huge catastrophe but when I came round and realised I was alive I thought: 'Right, now I'm going to do what I want to do with the rest of my life'. I felt I had been given another chance. I was very lucky to be alive."

  Up to that point Dunne had spent 10 years half working on a novel, constantly distracted by the demands of a full-time job (teaching English and Spanish in a "very deprived but fantastic" Dublin school) and raising her young son. However, within two years of being discharged from hospital she had finished her first book and found a publisher.

  Dunne roots her limpid, accessible fiction in ordinary women's lives, exploring <>; <>

  Her latest novel, Set In Stone, had been gestating for more than 20 years before she sat down to write the story of Lynda Graham, a mother of two whose contented, comfortable middle-class existence is shattered by a destructive blast from the past.

  "I'm fascinated by secrets," says Dunne when we meet for coffee near her north London publisher's HQ. "Everybody keeps secrets. When do those secrets become toxic and when are they best kept secret? It's people's interior lives that fascinate me.

  "For me from a very young age the theatre of the family was where it all happens. Where do you get more drama? More love, more lust, more hate? It's all there."

  Although Dunne's fiction is rooted in Irish domestic life (or perhaps because of that) her readership extends across Europe with her novels translated into several languages.

  Her Italian sales received a notable boost when Veronica Lario, the wife of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, publicly identified herself with one of Dunne's characters. "I ask if, like the Catherine Dunne character, I have to regard myself as 'half of nothing'," wrote Lario in an open letter to Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

  She identified with Rose, a character in In The Beginning (1997) whose husband abruptly leaves her.

  At the time of Lario's comments Dunne was living in Spain, a country she had fallen in love with as a teenager. When her marriage broke up in 2005 she moved there to avoid the Irish winter and she was still there in summer 2007 when a friend called from Italy and announced: "You're all over the newspapers!"

  "Eight hours later I got off the phone. It hadn't stopped ringing: radio interviews, print interviews. I was asked did I think Mr Berlusconi should apologise? I said I certainly did! Veronica Lario was offended, hurt and humiliated.

  "Berlusconi did apologise but the body language was interesting; it wasn't much of an apology. I thought it was probably the first salvo in a rather expensive divorce campaign and so it has proved.

  "It's hugely gratifying when any reader gives you a response like that. There was the added bonus for me that it was so public. The books already sell well in Italy but it gave another layer of success which was very gratifying."

  A voracious reader from an early age, for Dunne "writing was as natural as reading. I didn't understand that there was a difference until I was a teenager. I thought everyone who read wrote."

  HENRIK IBSEN'S A Doll's House, a play about a woman who turns her back on a suffocating marriage, first showed Dunne that fiction could explore ordinary women's lives. As a teenager Dunne felt that "most writers were men and most of these male writers were exploring life in rural Ireland. The main character was the man and the view of the world was the man's. When I started to write women's lives were not the stuff of fiction.

  "Reading Margaret Atwood was another explosion of a sense of possibility: that women's lives, that ordinary lives were something that could be written about."

  She also cites Carol Shields, Alice Munro and Jane Austen as key influences. Not that Dunne is writing specifically for women; she simply writes the stories that interest her. She didn't even shy away from writing her second novel from a male perspective.

  Dunne publishes a novel about every other year, a pace that demands a lot of 14-hour days at her laptop but she has also enjoyed success with a well-received foray into non-fiction, after documenting the experience of Irish emigrants to London in the Sixties in An Unconsidered People.

  Describing her greatest luxury in life as travel, this year she will dodge her second Dublin winter in a row by spending two months in India where her eighth novel Missing Julia is partly set.

  She has no interest in a five-star lifestyle, however. Last year she and her partner (able to accompany her because he is retired) stayed in a "rickety little guest house. You don't see life in five-star hotels, you see wealth."

  Dunne has spent the past week in London, promoting Set In Stone and spending time with her son who recently moved to London (his job involves something to do with mobile phone applications but is so technological she doesn't know what it is) and is taking his very excited mum to the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park.

  She will fly back to Dublin the day after where she will wait for inspiration to strike for her ninth novel. "I believe stories choose the writer, rather than the other way round," she says.

  "Writing is such an isolating activity that I don't think it's something you can do if you don't enjoy it.

  "You have to go to that desk and sit down and start writing whether you have inspiration or not but one thing writing could never be is boring."

  Catherine Dunne's book Set In Stone is published by Macmillan, price £12.99.

  To order a copy with free UK delivery send a cheque or PO made payable to Sunday Express Bookshop to PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or call 0871 988 8366 (calls cost 10p per minute from UK landlines).

  You can also order it online at www.expressbookshop.co.uk

• The Irish News - http://www.irishnews.com/lifestyle/2016/04/14/news/dublin-writer-catherine-dunne-harks-back-to-greek-myth-for-10th-novel-the-years-that-followed-485334/

  Dublin writer Catherine Dunne harks back to Greek myth for 10th novel The Years That Followed
  Dublin writer Catherine Dunne's 10th novel is a tale of two women, set in Cyprus and Spain between the 60s and 80s and inspired by Greek myth. She talks to Brian Campbell

  Dublin writer Catherine Dunne harks back to Greek myth for 10th novel The Years That Followed
  Catherine Dunne's latest novel was inspired by Greek myths

  BRIAN CAMPBELL
  14 April, 2016 01:00
  RELATED STORIES
  Book reviews: round-up of the latest book releases
  Dublin writer Catherine Dunne harks back to Greek myth for 10th novel The Years That Followed
  The Years That Followed is Dunne's 10th novel
  AS WELL as being one of Ireland’s best-loved novelists, Catherine Dunne has always been a big deal in Italy too.

  The Dublin writer’s first book, In the Beginning, was published almost 20 years ago (in 1997) and was a popular and critical success. Translated into several languages, it went on to be shortlisted for the ‘Bancarella’ – the Italian booksellers’ prize.

  In 2007, Silvio Berlusconi’s wife wrote a letter to the La Repubblica newspaper complaining about the former Italian Prime Minister's behaviour and comparing herself to `a character in a Catherine Dunne novel'.

  Dunne – whose father moved from Co Down to Dublin in the 1940s - went on to win the Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction in 2013 for her book The Things We Know.

  Now she has published her 10th novel, The Years That Followed, which is inspired by Greek myth. It takes us from the 60s to the 80s and tells the dual stories of Calista - who leaves Dublin aged 17 for Cyprus after being swept off her feet by older man Alexandros – and Pilar, who has moved to Madrid from rural Extremadura.

  As the two stories are interweaved, tragic and life-changing events unfold that will link their lives in a way that the pair couldn’t have imagined.

  Is it true that you had been thinking about this story for many years before writing it?

  It is. I was always a voracious reader and the Greek myths always fascinated me. When I went to read them again as an adult I found them very different to what I remembered. So I had that idea of trying to bring something old and tried and trusted as a story up to date. I read Jane Smiley’s book A Thousand Acres, her retelling of King Lear, and thought it was brilliant. So I thought I’d go back to the Greek myths and the one that leapt out at me was Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. I probably started reading up on it five years ago and the book itself took me the guts of three years to write because it was quite complicated plot-wise. It was exhilarating and fun and very different, so I wanted to enjoy it and I didn’t want to rush it.

  What was your starting point for the book?

  Well I knew I wanted to set it in a time when modern communication was impossible. I wanted Calista to be young and naïve, this young and inexperienced teenager. Pilar came out of nowhere and was just one of those insistent characters that tapped me on the shoulder and said, `I have a story too’.

  Did you spend much time in Spain and Cyprus while you were writing?

  It was mostly written in good old rainy Dublin, but I did do a bit of research in Spain and Cyprus. I have lived in Spain off and on over the years. I lived there for a year before I went to university and then I got a writing fellowship in the Beckett Foundation in the south of Spain in 2006, so I stayed on for about six months.

  How did you become such a big success in Italy?

  If I knew that, I would know how to reproduce it everywhere! It was just like a perfect storm. My first book really hit a chord there and I had a really interested and committed publisher. The book took off in a big way, so when that happens you’ve got a foundation to build on. And then there was the Berlusconi incident; you couldn’t make that up. That certainly helped. It’s been great in Italy; a rollercoaster. Long may it continue.

  Where were you when you heard about the Berlusconi letter?

  I was actually living in Spain at the time. A friend in Rome called me and said, `You’re all over the papers’ and I said `I’m not even there, what have I done?!’ And so I heard about the letter and it all went on from there. I was living in a small flat with hardly any mobile signal, so I remember standing in one spot to get reception because the mobile just never stopped that day.

  While you are best known for your novels, you have written one non-fiction book - An Unconsidered People, a social history of Irish immigrants in London. Would you consider doing more non-fiction?

  That book was special, because it was inspired by a chance meeting in the 80s with someone crossing from the former Yugoslavia to Venice in a boat. I had a conversation with a woman who had left Ireland in the 1950s and she talked about an Ireland I hadn’t known about. Everybody in Ireland had somebody who lived abroad but I didn’t realise just how widespread it was and how it tore apart the fabric of the entire society. I found out that in the 1940s, of all children born, four out of five left the country. It wasn’t something we were told about in school and that kind of social history interests me. I was born in 1954 so getting to research the 50s was a fascinating eye-opener. It was a privilege for me to talk to people about their stories and they illustrate the story of the half a million Irish people who went to the UK.

  Do you have any more book launches coming up?

  Well we had one in Dublin and one in Doolin in Co Clare and one in Belfast, so the book is well-sailed at this stage! I had an Italian launch last year and it’ll be out in the US in October and I’ll be going to Canada too. So it’s all go. It’s good to be busy.

  The Years That Followed is out now, published by Macmillan. Catherine Dunne will appear at Finaghy Library in south Belfast at 6.30pm on Monday April 25 along with Lia Mills and Martina Devlin as part of `Two Cities, One Book’ (www.dublinonecityonebook.ie)

• Independent - http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/irish-authors-novel-wins-top-italian-award-for-literature-29594936.html

  Irish author's novel wins top Italian award for literature
  Catherine Dunne1
  Catherine Dunne
  John Spain Books Editor
  September 21 2013 4:00 AM

  IRISH author Catherine Dunne, a favourite writer of Silvio Berlusconi's ex-wife, has won one of Italy's top literary awards for her last novel.
  The novel, 'The Things We Know Now', has been awarded the prestigious Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction, named after the great Italian writer. Previous winners of the prize include Vikram Seth, Mark Haddon and Muriel Spark.
  Published in Italy last November under the title 'Quel Che Ora Sappiamo', Catherine Dunne's novel has been another bestseller for her there. She has a huge readership in Italy where many of her nine novels to date have also been bestsellers.

  Her name and her novels achieved a national profile in Italy in 2007 when she was quoted by Silvio Berlusconi's then wife Veronica in a public reprimand of her philandering husband. Mr Berlusconi had been caught by a microphone chatting up young women backstage at a TV awards ceremony.
  Mrs Berlusconi said she felt like a woman in one of Catherine Dunne's books, referring to Dunne's novel 'In The Beginning' in which the main character Rose is suddenly abandoned by her husband.

  "I ask if, like the Catherine Dunne character, I have to regard myself as 'half of nothing'," she wrote.
  The story made national news in Italy and had women all over the country queuing up to buy books by Ms Dunne.

  Her latest novel which has now won the Boccaccio Prize deals with what the judges called "the most painful grief that anyone can endure – the loss of a child through suicide".
  Although less successful in Ireland, Dunne's novels have been praised by the critics here and in Britain who place her at the literary end of popular fiction.
  Irish Independent

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Print Marked Items
The Years That Followed
Alison Spanner
Booklist.
113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Years That Followed. By Catherine Dunne. Oct. 2016. 352p. Touchstone, $25 (9781501135668).
Catherine Dunne (The Things We Know Now, 2013) splits her newest novel between two protagonists, Calista and
Pilar, each of whom watches helplessly as choices they made as young women in love reverberate through the rest of
their lives. Readers first meet Calista in 1966, shortly before she moves from her home in Dublin to Cyprus with an
older man, the youngest son of a successful and ruthless Greek businessman, whose true character is revealed only after
Calista becomes pregnant and effectively trapped in a foreign country. Meanwhile, in rural Spain, Pilar forges a more
independent path, at her mother's urging, when she leaves home for Madrid, where she proves herself to be a very
effective businesswoman. But an impossible relationship, and the heart­wrenching decision resulting from it, puts Pilar
on a collision course with Calista in surprising and imaginative ways. In this page­turner that's both poignant and
satisfying, <> ­­Alison Spanner
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Spanner, Alison. "The Years That Followed." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 49+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755115&it=r&asid=20f3d47f7beebefb48a5397e2c87a8dd.
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The Years That Followed
Publishers Weekly.
263.32 (Aug. 8, 2016): p39.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Years That Followed
Catherine Dunne. Touchstone, $25 (352p) ISBN 978­1­5011­3566­8
Dunne's (The Things We Know Now) latest traces the parallel lives of two women connected by a single shocking
event. At 17, Calista married successful, charismatic Alexandros and left her native Dublin for his family estate in
Cyprus­­a whirlwind romance with a man who suddenly turned controlling and violent. As her marriage reaches a
breaking point, Calista is forced to make an impossible choice that irreparably alters her relationship with her children,
and though she rebuilds her life and finds love again, her years with Alexandros led to tragedies for which she can
never forgive him. In Madrid, Pilar fights her way out of humble beginnings and makes a name for herself in the
business world. Along the way, she embarks on a forbidden, tragic romance with a handsome Cypriot of her own.
Years later, she begins a redemptive search for the son she was forced to give up and finds herself confronted by the
past in unexpected ways. Though the two women never meet, their lives are intertwined in ways they could never
guess, culminating in a surprising, grisly discovery in the apartment building Pilar owns. Though the narrative might
have benefited from more explicit ties between the two stories, taken separately, both women are nuanced, sympathetic
characters whose lives and loves are well developed throughout this darkly compelling story. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Years That Followed." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 39+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900341&it=r&asid=71066e0d5697845d3011fbd70f354e17.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460900341

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In the Beginning
Publishers Weekly.
245.8 (Feb. 23, 1998): p52.
COPYRIGHT 1998 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Catherine Dunne. Jonathan Cape (Trafalgar Sq., dist.), $17.95 (282p) ISBN 0­224­04426­5
What do you do when your husband of 20 years walks out one day without any warning? This debut from Irish novelist
Dunne describes Rose Holden's desperate struggle to build a new life for herself after her husband flies off to Malaga
with his business partner's wife. In alternating chapters, Dunne chronicles the prehistory of the Holdens' marriage and
the "internal revolution" Rose experiences after Ben leaves her. In the process, Dunne depicts, with compelling clarity
and precision, how married life can dissolve into soul­destroying routine and tragedy­­and casts a cold eye on
contemporary Irish norms of marriage and divorce. In spite of her initial humiliation at Ben's desertion, Rose soon
realizes that she doesn't want her husband back. She discovers, instead, the frightening but exhilarating possibility of
making a life of her own: raising her three children and supporting herself as a caterer, in a job that gives her a new
view of the relation between the sexes. Dunne uses lucid, understated prose to tell this <>
Her finely drawn characters and sharp insights make for an auspicious debut. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"In the Beginning." Publishers Weekly, 23 Feb. 1998, p. 52. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20334678&it=r&asid=786bc78be56ed5523386d899892ad060.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20334678

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In the Beginning
Susan Gene Clifford
Library Journal.
123.5 (Mar. 15, 1998): p92.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Dunne, Catherine. In the Beginning. Jonathan Cape, dist. by Trafalgar Square. Apr. 1998. c.288p. ISBN 0­224­
04426­5. pap. $17­95. F
Ben, Rose, and their three kids are an ordinary Dublin family. Or so they seem until one morning when Ben simply
walks out on them and flies off to Spain with his partner's wife. In alternating chapters, this first novel reviews Ben and
Rose's marriage and follows Rose's struggle to reconstruct her life and preserve her children's home when he is gone.
As the crying subsides, she pulls herself together and turns her culinary skills into a catering and bakery business,
which brings form, substance, and a future to her life. This is not a new story; in fact, it's all too familiar. What sets this
effort apart from the other novels of broken marriages and the resourcefulness of former wives is <>. The simplicity and style with which she unfolds her story is very intimate, carefully paced, and
emotionally powerful. <> it is <>. A new generation of Irish authors is today
producing some fine writing, and among them Dunne deserves special attention. Recommended for all fiction
collections.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Clifford, Susan Gene. "In the Beginning." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 1998, p. 92. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20458228&it=r&asid=a77f71eddac0976dd8da63be88eee96f.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
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In the Beginning
Kevin Grandfield
Booklist.
94.15 (Apr. 1998): p1302.
COPYRIGHT 1998 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Mimicking the book of Genesis, Duanne, in this excellently paced and emotionally nuanced first novel, tells the sevenday
recreation of the world of Rose, a North Dublin woman whose husband unceremoniously dumps her on April 1,
after 20 years of marriage. Feeling like an April Fool and Rip Van Winkle, Rose learns within a week how to rule her
own world and create light from darkness, a daunting prospect in largely Catholic and male­dominated Ireland. While
interspersed scenes from the past show the marriage souring, Rose in the present is steadied by late­night planning
sessions, drinking wine with her next­door neighbor Jane. Jane's catering friend offers work, and Rose, a veteran cook
of many family meals, eventually starts her own business ­­ baking wedding cakes, ironically. <> as she grows confident enough to refuse her husband's pleas for reconciliation and to make a success of her
business, her kids, and her life on her own. One hopes<< Dunne finds similar success as a novelist.>>
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Grandfield, Kevin. "In the Beginning." Booklist, Apr. 1998, p. 1302+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20505081&it=r&asid=07ac5551989c332939e5dd389b0cd84a.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20505081

Spanner, Alison. "The Years That Followed." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 49+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755115&it=r. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017. "The Years That Followed." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 39+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900341&it=r. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017. "In the Beginning." Publishers Weekly, 23 Feb. 1998, p. 52. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20334678&it=r. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017. Clifford, Susan Gene. "In the Beginning." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 1998, p. 92. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20458228&it=r. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017. Grandfield, Kevin. "In the Beginning." Booklist, Apr. 1998, p. 1302+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20505081&it=r. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/catherine-dunne/the-years-that-followed/
  Word count: 383

  THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED
  by Catherine Dunne
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  KIRKUS REVIEW

  Irish novelist Dunne makes her U.S. debut with this intricate saga.

  The title of this novel is a puzzle. Which of the events or choices to be found here answers the question: followed what? The first and splashiest is a double murder—a hit—ordered by one of the two female protagonists, Calista, and discovered by the other, Pilar. The concern of the book, though, is not what follows this particular piece of violence but what caused it and what connects the two women despite their separate lives. Calista is from Dublin, the daughter of a wealthy Irish businessman and a well-bred Spanish mother. In 1966, when she's 17, she's seduced by 30-year-old Alexandros, an associate of her father’s, becomes pregnant, and is made to marry him and move to his family home in Cyprus. This is an old tale, but Dunne reveals the brutal power of the seduction—the way, when Alexandros forces himself on Calista, she convinces herself it's love. Pilar’s story echoes Calista’s in looping, interesting ways. She comes from a poor background in the Spanish countryside but, with fierce, cagey tenacity, crafts a life for herself in Madrid, coming to own and run the high-class apartment building where a murder will one day take place. Unlike her own mother, and unlike Calista in a nearby part of the world, Pilar is never abused by men. Nonetheless, she finds herself pregnant with few options and little support. The redemptive qualities of children (and the devastation that comes with their loss) factor into all the lives in this tale. Calista and Pilar are wonderful characters to watch develop as they weather this theme and as they work to define and enrich themselves against steep, cruel odds.

  <>

  Pub Date: Oct. 11th, 2016
  ISBN: 9781501135668
  Page count: 352pp
  Publisher: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster
  Review Posted Online: July 20th, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1st, 2016

• The Irish Times
  http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-years-that-followed-review-wealth-sunshine-and-mythology-1.2595182
  Word count: 938

  The Years That Followed review: wealth, sunshine and mythology
  A revenge tale that follows the fortunes of two women whose lives intertwine via a powerful family

  Christina Hunt Mahony
  Sat, Apr 2, 2016, 05:45
  First published:
  Sat, Apr 2, 2016, 05:45

  BUY NOW

  Book Title:
  The Years That Followed
  ISBN-13:
  978-1447211686
  Author:
  Catherine Dunne
  Publisher:
  Macmillan
  Guideline Price:
  £16.99
  Popular fiction written and read mostly by women is usually set in an intensely realised world where detail is everything: the scent of jasmine on the evening air, rapid sunsets that plunge characters into darkness in warm southerly climates, the swirl of powerful emotions when felt for the first time.
  Catherine Dunne’s 10th novel is part of this tradition. Set in various regions of Spain and in Cyprus, The Years That Followed is not short on minute and memorable description. Dunne’s afterword confirms recent travels to authenticate locales for her book. She even imbeds one of her Spanish guides into the text by giving her name to a minor character. This isn’t, then, a book penned by a solitary writer in a garret.
  Events occur with an eye to paralleling and twinning, as the life stories of two very different women converge.
  Paddy Armstrong and his wife Caroline and family at their wedding in 1998Life after a life sentence: I’m 39 and scared of everyone
  Paddy Bushe: he writes in both English and Irish and has published 10 collections. Photograph: Pat Boran‘Irish Times’ Poetry Now Award won by Paddy Bushe
  Michèle Forbes is also an award-winning actor, and her insight into the world of performance is astuteEdith & Oliver review: Illusions of grandeur
  First there is Calista, an affluent Irish girl with a Spanish mother, who becomes the pregnant bride of a Greek-Cypriot shipping magnate’s youngest son. Next is Pilar, the only daughter of impoverished farmers in Extremadura. Pilar escapes to Madrid and acquires financial independence, only to be seduced and impregnated by the magnate himself. Both young women had strained home lives they succeed in escaping, only to find themselves at times vulnerable and alone.
  When Maeve Binchy created young women eager for new lives, they were not always wise. They made mistakes, and they learned from them. Such characters also existed in a realistic social context. A girl who falls hopelessly for a handsome stranger or a married man were provided with girlfriends or office mates or neighbours who at least attempted to confront the starry-eyed victim with a few home truths.
  Dunne isn’t as thoughtful as Binchy in this regard. The beautiful teenaged Calista, even before her shotgun wedding and removal to her husband’s family compound in Cyprus, exists nearly in a vacuum. Apart from her parents and twin brother and a canny housemaid, Calista seems to interact with no one.
  Similarly the less pampered, no-nonsense Pilar makes no real friends in Madrid, instead taking all her cues from a benign mystery man from her mother’s village. Neither character has a cohort, and in this empty space Dunne’s plotting is far easier to construct.
  The action of the novel is set in 1989, but much of the backstory is told in interleaved chapters that begin in the 1960s, when both women first encountered the Demitriades family, and inches forward in time. The gap between the past and present is artfully signalled by references to changes in fashions, reading matter and social trends.
  Calista’s going-away costume is a Jackie Kennedy suit with pillbox hat. She reads Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn. Women’s lib rears its controversial head. Parallel political upheavals of the 1970s provide common ground – the Troubles in Northern Ireland and, pivotally, the Greek-Cypriot crisis.
  Mythological references
  Apart from its international ambiance, The Years That Followed is punctuated with Homeric references and feint echoes from Greek mythology. Calista’s second child, a son, is named Omiros. We are also reminded that the love affair between Aphrodite and Adonis ended on Cyprus, when a jealous goddess sent a boar to gore the beautiful youth.
  This <> in Dunne’s pages. Never short on violence, the novel is essentially a revenge tragedy. We know that Calista’s handsome husband is dead nearly from the start, but why and how? By whose hand or whose order? It will take the author 300 pages to divulge.
  In the meantime, several well-drawn secondary characters emerge to pique our interest. Both young women have disappointed mothers thwarted by marriage, and in this they are joined by the mother of the Demitriades brood. What all three women of this earlier generation share is a crippling awareness of social class and gender inequity, and control over their adult children.
  In the later timeframe, the local tavern owners, young Jaime and Rosa, and Jaime’s amiable parents, stand in vivid contrast to all the privileged and damaged folk in this generational story – they actually like their work and each other, and seem to enjoy life. We meet them through Calista, who, after more tragedy and loss, has unknowingly settled in a palatial home in Pilar’s home village.
  Thus the wheel of fate turns again. Dunne ties up the skeins connecting two women whose life choices draw them into the same orbit of volatile secrecy and vengeful murder.
  Christina Hunt Mahony is a senior research fellow in the School of English, Trinity College

• Red Carpet Crash
  http://redcarpetcrash.com/book-review-years-followed-lacks-depth/
  Word count: 1146

  Book Review: ‘The Years That Followed’ Lacks Depth
  James McDonald January 15, 2017

  Review by Adrina Palmer

  Acclaimed international bestseller Catherine Dunne’s thrilling US debut is the story of two wronged women bent on revenge at all costs.

  ‘The Years That Followed’ trails two women from the 1960s to 2016. Loose connections between the two protagonists make for an interesting read but not necessarily a realistic read. Written by seasoned writer Catherine Dunne, each story would have been capable of entertaining without being forcefully woven together. When Pilar and Calista finally do meet, the connection, long awaited from the second chapter, is underwhelming at best. All those chapters leading to the possibility of a more tantalizing connection of joining the two lives could have been much more enchanting. As it is, the stories are engrossing and poignant, but the ending is lackluster in comparison to the grandiose expected ending.

  Meet Calista, a naive teenager living with her parent and twin brother in Dublin. At the tender age of seventeen her father’s business associate, Alexandros, steals Calista away to his home in Mediterranean Cyprus for a shotgun wedding before their baby is born. He waits years to start hitting Calista, but by then the abuse is not unexpected as she has never quite lived up to his expectations of a dutiful wife. Calista’s only fault is her inability to blend into a foreign culture, create lasting friendships, and be the perfect younger trophy wife for the wealthy and prominent family. Each new change Calista hopes will settle Alexandros’ waging temper and return him to the lover she once knew. When a daughter, a son, and a new home fail to calm his temper, Calista tries to run home to Dublin permanently. Alexandros puts an alert on his children’s passports and takes them home, leaving Calista childless at the airport. For the next decade he denies his now ex-wife access to her children, but with the help of her former mother-in-law and brother-in-law, Calista finds small secret moments with her daughter. Before long her feelings for her former brother-in-law turn to a less than sisterly love. Alexandros is not content to let Calista have any shred of happiness and soon pulls every thread until her life unravels completely.

  Meet Pilar, a teenager determined to evade the penniless pitfalls her mother endured. As soon as Pilar is of age, her mother pushes her to the big city, Madrid, with the few bits of coin tucked away over the years. For the next several years, Pilar works her way up from laundress living in a boarding house at a convent, to a woman running her own wealthy apartment building with the help of a family friend. Settled into her new life, Pilar seeks love for the first time in all her years of devout hard work. She soon falls into the much older arms of Petros, a business man visiting from Cyprus who soon devotes more time to Madrid. When Petros chooses retirement over his love of Pilar, he is unaware of her pregnant belly. Without a father to help raise the baby, Pilar puts her infant son into the arms of a nun for safe delivery to a young couple. Her life becomes even more lonesome over the coming years, so she decides to seek what love remains, her son. For a brief moment, the lives of Pilar and Calista intertwine late in their lives with the hope they can find happiness in the same city.

  The elements did not align for a stellar read in this novel. The characters are stereotypical. Calista is easy to sympathize with; she has done nothing to deserve the way Alexandros treats her. Alexandros is not unique in his behavior, and more could have been done to develop his character, as well as, to develop his father and mother. The entire story revolving around Calista is very narrow; you are only meant to feel for her and the children. Even the conflict with her mother barely hits the surface. The bond with her twin brother could have been played up to more substantial than it reads. The final choice Calista made, which was built up from the prologue to the epilogue, is understandable but loses momentum with the delivery.

  Pilar is too tough to empathize with; her emotions are too closed off to fully suffer along with her. The decisions that propel her into the future leave much to be desired, along with the very few relationships she manages to build. There is no strong desire to relate to her, just a desire to see if just once, Pilar will make a meaningful connection to another human being. While she does manage to make a connection by the end of the novel, even this relationship is only half-baked. Pilar’s story pulls right out; Dunne should have focused more on Calista and the real connections she has, instead of forcing her to share the spotlight with the overly reserved Pilar.

  More issues abound in this novel. The background, while detailed, pays no attention to time despite each chapter labeled by year. The only mention of era related scenery is a war in Cyprus. With the shadows of Greece, London, Ireland, Spain, and Cyprus, more should have been done to differentiate the surroundings. The years could just fall off without any real notice except for the necessity to understand the ages of the main characters. The two stories are told in a series of flashbacks incapable of staying in order. Dunne should have taken the characters back and told the story forwards from there, instead of taking the characters back a few years and then back a few more with little grace. Finally, some surprises were mentioned and then dropped without being picked back up, leaving unanswered questions which is not acceptable.

  ‘The Years That Followed’ has too many issues to be a provocative read. My hope was completely built up based on a strong beginning, but the ending failed to deliver. I would have preferred more fully developed characters to go along with the fully developed plot. The ending was unsatisfactory only because the connection between Calista and Pilar was too transparent when a bond was expected. Wait for the paperback version.

  Available in bookstores now

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  James McDonald
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  Film / Theater Critic & Interviewer at Red Carpet Crash
  Born in Dublin, Ireland, but living in Dallas, Texas, James is an Independent Filmmaker and also a Film Critic and Interviewer at Red Carpet Crash. He has worked in the film industry for over thirty years and has won many awards with his movies playing at film festivals worldwide.

• The Irish Times
  http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-things-we-know-now-by-catherine-dunne-1.1333997
  Word count: 1001

  The Things We Know Now, by Catherine Dunne
  A sensitive and insightful novel portrays a family trying to come to terms with the death by suicide of their son after he is bullied by schoolmates

  Anna Carey
  Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 12:03
  First published:
  Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 06:00

  BUY NOW

  Book Title:
  The Things We Know Now
  ISBN-13:
  978-1447229568
  Author:
  Catherine Dunne
  Publisher:
  Macmillan
  Guideline Price:
  Sterling13.99
  E ven in the happiest and closest families, there is a gulf between parents and children. Young people occupy their own world, full of fears and joys that they never share with their families. Catherine Dunne ’s moving new novel looks at what happens when tragedy forces one couple to cross that gulf and uncover their son’s other life. The story begins with a nightmarish shock, as the novel’s central narrator, Patrick Grant, and his wife, Ella, return home from an afternoon of sailing to discover their beloved teenage son, Daniel, has killed himself. He was, as his father said, “a boy who had it all. Love, security, financial certainties, talents to burn”. What could have led him to take his own life? What did Ella and Patrick not know about their son?
  In the first half of the book, Patrick looks back on the past few decades in an attempt to find out what happened. Ella is Patrick’s second wife; they met when he went to her for counselling after the death of his first wife, Cecelia. He has three grown-up children from his first marriage, Sophie, Frances and Rachel.
  His relationship with Rebecca, the eldest, has been fraught ever since she was a little girl, when she witnessed her mother crying over one of Patrick’s several affairs.
  Although Patrick and Cecelia reconciled and went on to have a seemingly happy and faithful marriage, Rebecca has never forgiven her father. And when she discovers that he’s going to marry a woman 20 years his junior, she finds it impossible to accept. As far as Rebecca is concerned, marrying Ella is Patrick’s ultimate betrayal of her own beloved mother.
  Her sisters welcome Ella into the family, but when Daniel is a born just a few months after Rebecca gives birth to her own eldest child, she feels even more alienated from her father.
  As the book goes on, we see the family through both Patrick’s and Rebecca’s eyes, and it becomes clear that while Patrick may not have truly known Daniel, the gulf between himself and his eldest daughter may be even greater.
  Gradually, the source of Daniel’s torment is revealed. A good-natured, kind and talented boy, who loved art and boating, he had always been open and cheerful until starting secondary school. After his death, Patrick tortures himself by remembering things that now clearly look like warning signs but that he dismissed at the time.
  Eventually Patrick discovers the truth, and it’s not giving away too much to say that Daniel was badly bullied by a gang of schoolmates, a topic Dunne handles<< with sensitivity and insight.>> Throughout the book, she reminds us that bullying is nothing new; we see that Patrick was also a victim of vicious bullying at his boarding school, 50 years earlier.
  The bullies of his youth, whether fellow pupils or the teachers themselves, tormented their victims with brutal violence. But modern technology enables psychological torture, and the ubiquity of internet-enabled devices, from laptops to smartphones, makes escape from the bullies impossible even when a child is at home. Dunne’s depiction of Daniel’s torment and increasing desperation is both harrowing and convincing, as his schoolmates’ <>
  Although Patrick’s is always the dominant voice, the story moves between several narrators, from Daniel’s friends Edward and Sylvia to Rebecca and Daniel himself. The narrative voices aren’t as effective as they could be; the adult characters, including Patrick and Rebecca, whose narratives form the bulk of the book, often tell their stories in a curiously formal way that risks distancing the reader. And Ella, the bereaved mother, is a strangely opaque character; even the chapters supposedly told from her point of view are written in the third person.
  At times she seems too good to be true: constantly understanding, reasonable and thoughtful, always saying and doing the right thing. She lashes out once, but in a completely relatable way. What drew her to the much older Patrick? What does she really think about his children, especially the increasingly bitter Rebecca? We never really get into her head.
  But her feelings for her son and her grief at his death do feel painfully real. The section of the book devoted to the week after Daniel’s suicide is deeply moving, and Dunne writes brilliantly about the Grants’ pain and bewilderment; after taking down Daniel’s body after he has hanged himself, Patrick finds himself illogically believing, or rather hoping, “that the boy in my arms was not my son”. The couple cling to each other, each of them unable to let the other out of his or her sight, and their all- consuming grief and rage – and that of Patrick’s daughters – is superbly evoked, as is their slow journey towards some sort of peace.
  Throughout this powerful novel<< Dunne shows a keen and compassionate eye for the complexities of family dynamics>>, and as both Patrick and Rebecca start to come to terms with Daniel’s death, she reminds us that although the gulf between parents and children is always there, sometimes you can learn how to build a bridge.
  Anna Carey's debut novel, The Real Rebecca , won the Senior Children's Book prize at the 2011 Irish Book Awards. Her second book, Rebecca’s Rules , was shortlisted for the same prize in 2012.

• The Gryphon
  http://www.thegryphon.co.uk/2013/04/26/books-new-review-the-things-we-know-now-by-catherine-dunne/
  Word count: 452

  Books: New Review: The Things We Know Now by Catherine Dunne

  By The Gryphon Web Editor / 4 years ago / Article / No Comments
  Books: New Review: The Things We Know Now by Catherine Dunne
  the-things-we-know-now-

  The Things We Know Now offers, as the title suggests, an example of the power of hindsight. However, this insightful novel confronts the crisis that the Grants face following the suicide of their fourteen-year old son Daniel. Hindsight is not enough to bring him back.

  Told predominantly from Patrick Grant’s perspective, we learn about his unfaithful first marriage to Cecelia and subsequent strained relationship with his eldest daughter Rebecca. When Cecelia suddenly dies, Patrick’s world falls apart. His youngest daughters Frances and Sophie, whilst young and grieving themselves, take care of their father who is unable to survive on his own.

  Patrick overcomes Cecelia’s death with the help of a counsellor, Ella, and their relationship rapidly develops after Patrick’s counselling sessions have ended. The announcement of their engagement drives the wedge further between Patrick and his daughter. Following the birth of their son Daniel so shortly after Rebecca’s first son, this gulf seems too immense to breach.

  Daniel grows up to be an extremely gifted boy with incredible artistic talent and enthusiasm. Patrick’s happiness soars; he is a transformed man making the most of his second chance at being a good husband and father. Until Daniel’s suicide. The family’s lives are shattered and those that knew him are plunged into the depths of bewilderment. It is gradually revealed that Daniel had another side to his life that his parents were seemingly unaware of.

  Ella, who previously seems too understanding, too thoughtful, effectively too ideal, becomes a bereaved mother who exhibits grief that is agonisingly real. Both she and Patrick cope in the only way that they feel is possible, searching for answers. The entire family pull together to help them in this quest. Even Rebecca reaches out and forgives her father, despite their relationship being severely fractured for the best part of Rebecca’s life.

  The hopeful ending demonstrates how hindsight and loss can be channelled into something positive. The Grants will never recover but they a fuelled with the initiative to protect other children and to prevent tragedy from happening again.

  The Things We Know Now is<< a compelling and at times emotional read exploring the test of human endurance and familial strength in crisis. >>A thought-provoking page-turner, definitely worth picking up.

  The Things We Know Now is available now from Pan Macmillan.

  words: Jessica Loveridge

• Independent
  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-dead-eight-by-carlo-g233blermissing-julia-by-catherine-dunne-2313609.html
  Word count: 779

  The Dead Eight, By Carlo Gébler
  Missing Julia, By Catherine Dunne
  Reviewed by Peter Stanford Thursday 14 July 2011 23:00 BST0 comments

  1

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  The Independent Culture
  Carlo Gébler has already proved himself adept as a novelist in taking infamous episodes from Ireland's past and looking at them with modern eyes. The Cure and How To Murder A Man both revived 19th-century murders, drew readers into these complex human dramas, and explored the social, historical and emotional contexts of the crimes. The Dead Eight sees him returning to this fertile field, but at a stage much nearer to today: Eamon De Valera's claustrophobically Catholic Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s.

  In 1941, Harry "Badger" Gleeson, a farmer from New Inn, Co Tipperary, was tried, found guilty and hanged for the murder of his near neighbour, Moll McCarthy, an unmarried mother of seven known locally as "Foxy Moll" on account of her red hair and freedom with her sexual favours. He had found her mutilated body in a field between their properties.

  Many believed Gleeson to be innocent, though few spoke up in his defence for fear of being associated with McCarthy's "immoral" ways. A campaign to have him awarded a posthumous pardon has continued ever after.

  As a writer-in-residence at one of Northern Ireland's prisons, Gébler is clearly attracted to bigger questions of justice. So he invents a narrator – McCarthy's grandson, examining his own roots – and brings Foxy Moll vividly and convincingly to life, both as the product of her upbringing (the daughter of a mother who saw sex as simply an economic exchange of goods) and as a romantic who still hoped that the right one among her men would marry her. Yet Moll had been taught by life to be a realist. She had learnt to cope with disappointment each time she fell pregnant and her suitors returned to their wives.

  Equally arresting are Gébler's portraits of the men in her life, especially Johnny (JJ) Spink, the devilishly charismatic local Republican agitator, vain enough to be fond of wearing jodhpurs, who ruled his semi-criminal network ruthlessly. Moll had high hopes that he would stick by her, even after he had shown himself as faithless as all the rest. When a police officer, Anthony Daly, arrives in New Inn to target JJ and his gang, and immediately falls for Moll, she is caught between two lovers whose only true emotion is self-interest.

  Gleeson is just the kind-natured, unworldly soul who happens to be nearest when someone has to take the blame. The picture that Gébler paints of the entire Irish establishment – from police to courts to priest to public opinion – is as damning as anything his mother (Edna O'Brien) has ever produced about her homeland. The only ones who have the courage to stand up to the amoral machine that crushes Moll and Badger are the outsiders – Miss Cooney, last scion of the local Ascendancy family, stripped of influence since Irish independence, and Gleeson's employers, who have spent time in America.

  If this was what went on in a rural village at a time when the Church had a special place in the constitution, then modern Ireland is arguably well rid of Catholicism. The exodus from the pews, and the destruction of the moral authority of the clergy, have been precipitated by the scandal of clerical sex abuse, but The Dead Eight would suggest the loosening of religion's stranglehold was slowly coming to the boil in the hypocrisy of Foxy Moll's day.

  But what is left behind, especially when addressing those agonising ethical choices that most of us pray we will never have to face? That is the question posed by Irish novelist Catherine Dunne in Missing Julia. Her central character, a decent, thoughtful and admired Dublin doctor, suddenly vanishes. When her partner, William, begins to look behind the façade of their happy life together, he gradually finds that Julia has been in an ethical no-man's-land and forced to invent her own moral compass.

  Dunne hit the headlines a few years ago as "Mrs Berlusconi's favourite novelist". When the Italian prime minister's wife publicly dumped her slippery husband, she said she felt like "a character in a Catherine Dunne novel, half of nothing" (the title of one of Dunne's earlier books). It made for great theatre, but Dunne is a novelist of substance. Her evocative prose has much in common with Gébler's. Together, you might see them as providing a before-and-after picture of Ireland, each half equally compelling.

• The Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/a-very-intriguing-vanishing-1.673547
  Word count: 704

  A very intriguing vanishing
  Sat, Nov 6, 2010, 00:00
  NIAMH GREENE

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  FICTION: Missing JuliaBy Catherine Dunne Macmillan, 326pp. €9.20
  WHY WOULD you choose to leave your life behind and disappear without a trace? What could ever compel you to flee, heartbroken but resolute, from all you hold dear? These are some of the key questions at the core of Catherine Dunne’s intriguing and powerful new novel.
  William Harris and Julia Seymour have been together for more than three years. A novelist and a doctor respectively, they have found each other late in life. As they are both 60-plus, theirs is a comforting, easy sort of love, unshackled by the seesawing of adolescent emotions and the uncertainties of youthful infatuation. Not that this is a relationship without deep passion, however – and <> Above all, though, William and Julia are a solid partnership: they know what they want and they are sure of each other and their future together.
  It is quite a shock, then, when Julia disappears one October morning, and William’s life is thrown into unexpected and devastated disarray. What has happened to make Julia run without explanation or warning? Is she ill? Are there financial worries that William has somehow been unaware of? Has her difficult only daughter, Melissa, driven her away? Thrashing blindly through the abyss left by her absence, he is at a loss. But he soon discovers that Julia’s is no random disappearance: it is a planned, orderly retreat.
  As William struggles to understand this cataclysmic event, the reader is made privy to Julia’s story too. We discover, slowly, agonisingly, what has made her feel so off balance, so out of place in her own life that she believes she has no option but to retreat from what she knows and the people she loves. Julia, we learn, is a woman at odds with herself. She is, as William believes her to be, sensitive and sensible, with both feet firmly on the ground, yet she also believes herself to be a sham. How can she be the person she has pretended to be when she has kept perhaps the most significant thing about herself a secret?
  Now, with her past rearing its head and threatening to destroy her entire existence, she embarks on a crusade to tie up the loose ends, before fleeing.
  She is not being intentionally cruel in choosing to vanish like this, however. In fact, the opposite is true: she is struggling to protect William and her family and friends from a past action, determined not to endanger them by association. And yet it seems she cannot let go completely, leaving behind as she does small, almost indiscernible messages for William. Messages that only he will understand, like a queen out of place on their beloved chess board. Is she somehow hoping that he will follow and find her?
  Catherine Dunne’s novels have been praised for their ability to transform the everyday lives of ordinary people into immensely readable fiction and this is certainly true of Missing Julia. This novel is a compulsive page-turner that held me engrossed deep into the night, so eager was I to discover Julia’s dark secret and the reason for her flight. Dunne is a very talented storyteller, and, as the threads of the tale unravelled and the tension built, I found it impossible to resist the urge to race on towards the revelation and climax.
  There are darkness and suspense aplenty in Missing Julia, but so too is there raw emotion in all its stark, vulnerable and fragile humanity. With her by now trademark elegant and intelligent prose, Dunne explores whether we can ever really know anyone, especially those we love. What is the complex relationship between secrecy and intimacy that binds us all? Is anything ever what it seems? It’s certainly food for thought on these dark nights.
  Niamh Greene’s novel Rules for a Perfect Lifeis out in Penguin paperback

• The Irish Times
  http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/empathy-and-every-woman-1.761744
  Word count: 853

  Empathy and every woman
  Sat, Oct 24, 2009, 01:00

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  FICTION: CATHERINE HEANEYreviews Set In StoneBy Catherine Dunne Macmillan, 289pp. £12.99
  CATHERINE DUNNE’s novels have been praised in the past for their ability to transform the everyday lives of ordinary people into immensely readable and compelling fiction. So much so that they have made her an internationally bestselling author, in Italy in particular, where someone who could neverbe accused of leading a normal life – Silvio Berlusconi’s estranged wife, Veronica Lario – quoted Dunne in 2007 to describe how she felt after yet another humiliation at the hands of the philandering Italian premier. “I ask if, like the Catherine Dunne character, I have to regard myself as ‘half of nothing’,” Lario said – surely the most bizarre bit of name-checking the author has received, but proof nonetheless of her gift for creating Everywoman characters to whom even a creature as rarified as Lario can relate.
  Another such woman is the central figure in Dunne’s seventh novel, Set in Stone, a story exploring the ramifications of dark secrets in a family’s past. Lynda Graham is a 40something mother of two, living in an affluent Dublin suburb and married to her college sweetheart, decent, dependable Robert, a successful property developer (at least until recently). Lynda herself is an artist and garden designer, a sensible, sensitive woman, mindful of her own good fortune yet not immune to anxieties, especially about her children, and in particular her 19-year-old son, Ciarán. Adding to her creeping sense of unease is a darker shadow that hangs over the family, cast by her husband’s estranged brother Danny, a sociopath who blames Lynda and Robert for his own troubled life.
  The novel opens as an unnamed man surveys the Graham household through a camcorder, gathering footage to be delivered each day to the anonymous Wide Boy. From this point on, the story is largely told from Lynda’s viewpoint, reverting occasionally to that of the watcher, and Danny (who, we soon learn, is Wide Boy). While the latter two are engaged in a sinister and meticulously planned revenge strategy, life inside Lynda and Robert’s home is fraught with its own difficulties. As well as a series of menacing letters from Danny, and Robert’s struggling business, they must contend with Ciarán’s increasingly aggressive and reclusive behaviour. When he brings home a new friend, Jon, Lynda hopes that in spite of her reservations about the precocious young man, his charm will rub off on her son. But, inevitably, there is more to Jon than meets the eye.
  With all these elements in place, Dunne sets the stage for a fast-moving drama that switches back and forth in time, through flashbacks, and takes several twists along the way. <> In one of the most moving passages in the book, she describes the circumstances of the family tragedy that underpins the two brothers’ estrangement, and its subsequent effect on Danny’s life: “Nothing that won’t heal in time, he thinks? He’ll see about that.” Similarly, in recounting a disturbing episode from Danny’s childhood, she touches on the notion of innate evil – an idea she returns to later in the novel, though never quite fully explores.
  She is also a clear-eyed observer of the vagaries of the human heart, and through Lynda in particular, considers how emotions can influence a character’s actions: loneliness, infatuation, infidelity, maternal love, guilt – she chronicles them all with a combination of deep empathy and lucid matter-of-factness.
  All the same – and this, surely, is what makes her novels so popular – Dunne manages to combine this emotional intelligence with an absorbing, cleverly woven plot. She builds up tension layer by insidious layer, as Danny and the watcher (another fine character with his own sad story) wage their campaign of psychological terror on the Grahams, and skilfully brings the various strands of her story together as the novel reaches its climax.
  Not that Set In Stoneis without its shortcomings: there are moments when the action threatens to topple into melodrama and, more importantly, the credibility of the characters’ actions is at times overstretched. It’s hard to believe, for instance, that two responsible, hands-on parents would let an inscrutable young man such as Jon move into their home without even knowing his surname. And though the Dublin of the backdrop is familiar and well drawn, passing references to Anglo Irish Bank and the imploding property market seem almost superfluous, there purely to lend the story the cachet of currency. But quibble, quibble – Dunne’s legions of fans should certainly enjoy this elegantly written page-turner, and its cautionary tale of betrayal and revenge may even give the soon-to-be ex-Mrs Berlusconi some new food for thought.
  Catherine Heaney is a contributing editor to The Glossmagazine

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