With special guest:
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Monica McInerney
… in conversation with Bill Kable
When we speak with Monica McInerney she still sounds like she has lived all her life in South Australia. In fact she has become a local in Ireland over the last twenty years and knows very well the country around Dublin which is a big part of her new book The Godmothers.
The book could be used to promote the Irish countryside with its beautiful scenery and warm welcoming pubs. We also visit England and Scotland which is a welcome adventure when travel has become so restricted for all of us. But the main appeal of this story is that we learn about families, relationships and the often unforeseen consequences of our actions. In particular we are let in on some family secrets and different ways they are treated. Some secrets are bound to go to the grave while others can hardly be called secret since everyone in the family knows them.
Monica delves into the personalities of her characters and finds that everyone has a story, everyone has flaws and some are not very nice people. Along the way we get to question our own ethics. And there are surprises in store right to the last page.
The main character, Eliza Miller, has to become a bit of a detective and we follow her as she gets clues, some helpful, others not so much as she goes on a journey to find her father. This is a journey to discover relationships that we can all identify with. And we get a new appreciation of what a Godmother’s role can be in a threatening world.
The Godmothers is a book we can recommend to everyone
Monica McInerney
One of the stars of Australian fiction, Monica McInerney is the author of the internationally bestselling novels A Taste for It, Upside Down Inside Out, Spin the Bottle, The Alphabet Sisters, Family Baggage, Those Faraday Girls, At Home with the Templetons, Lola’s Secret, The House of Memories, Hello from the Gillespies, The Trip of a Lifetime and The Godmothers, and a short story collection, All Together Now.
Those Faraday Girls was the winner of the General Fiction Book of the Year prize at the 2008 Australian Book Industry Awards. In 2006 Monica was the ambassador for the Australian Government initiative Books Alive, with her novella Odd One Out.
Monica grew up in a family of seven children in the Clare Valley of South Australia and has been living between Australia and Ireland for twenty years. She and her Irish husband currently live in Dublin.
Song selection by our guest: A Sort of Homecoming by U2