Books

Coming in Septemner 2026

As well as travelling and writing about it, I have just completed a project that is very close to my heart and which I have been working on for a few years.

The Burning is a historical novel based on true events that occurred in my hometown of Dromcollogher, Co Limerick, in 1926. It is a  story of ambition, tragedy, courage and resilience, where the unthinkable can happen in the blink of an eye, where forty eight local people lost their loves in a cinema tragedy. It was the Stardust of its time and catapulted a sleepy, rural town to headline news around the world and changed the fabric of a small community forever.

It is  a story that has haunted me since childhood. I lived in a house ‘where no-one came home’, where all six members of a household left for a night’s entertainment down the street and never returned, leaving their bereft dog whining inside their front door all night. 

As a child, I spent many hours in the library that was built on the site of the tragedy, listening to ghosts.  Despite all this, I knew very little about the disaster or the lives of the people involved. They were just names etched on a huge Celtic Cross in the churchyard.

The makeshift cinema was organised by Babe Forde, a young, illegitimate and disabled man. The more I researched, the more fascinated I became by this person who dared to dream big, who wanted to make a name for himself and who paid a huge price for his ambition.

How does a small community cope with tragedy on this scale? The practicalities of identifying the dead, the shortage of coffins, and the digging of a mass grave are only the beginning.  There is grief, the questioning of faith and a loss of innocence when the unthinkable can happen in an instant.