A passionate writer, I am currently writing a historical novel, inspired by my Grandmother Courtney, who delighted me always with stories from her childhood about life on the family farm in the wonderfully named Irish village of 'Turkish', not far north of Belfast. I am an Irish historian, recently published by Anthem Press, having written a first biography of leading Cork revolutionary and former mentor to Michael Collins(the eponymously) entitled, P.S. O'Hegarty (1879-1955): Sinn Fein Fenian.
For further details please see http://anthempress.com/ and/or http://www.amazon.co.uk/P-S-OHegarty-1879-1955-Nineteenth-Century/dp/1843318598/ref=reg_hu-wl_item-added).
As with much of the above, my novel, set in Ireland in 1920, centres on the tumult surrounding Ireland's revolutionary period, specifically here, in the midst of its short (and commonly referred to) War of Independence. This is the story of two brothers, as surreptitiously told by the younger, surviving sibling and main character, 'Finn', in the scrap pages of what he calls his self-styled 'jail journal'.
This first chapter begins with Fin's describing a journey, a recent 'bike-ride' writ forever large in his memory, and the gateway through which he finds the courage to set down the details of both his and his brother Terry's terrible and tragic story and a host of as yet unknown as till now unexplored self-revelatory, self-discoveries,the nature of which Fin knows will determine his fate.