Unsuccessful bids on 8 different houses left journalist and writer Eithne Shortall exasperated, fed up, but more importantly, inspired to write her second novel, she told Ryan Tubridy.
Without giving too much away, Grace after Henry follows the story of a couple shopping around for a new home when tragedy strikes.
"It begins with Grace at a house viewing, and she’s waiting for Henry to arrive but Henry never makes it to the house viewing because he has a bicycle accident… I just wrote out my worst fears, which is cycling along the quays, in his case wearing a scarf that gets caught in the spokes, a red scarf that Grace has knit for him. I have come off my bike cycling along the quays but it wasn’t a scarf, it was one of those cloth bags… It just fell down my arm and then it got caught in the spokes and luckily I wasn’t killed. I broke my arm and I broke my leg."
Waiting to go on @RyanTubridyShow to talk about this book. So tune into @RTERadio1 if you’re near a wireless. Eek! pic.twitter.com/7Y7gHLEYds
— Eithne Shortall (@eithneshortall) May 2, 2018
Eithne fell onto the pavement and sustained terrible injuries, but had she fallen the other way, she most likely would not be here to tell the tale. In her book, Henry was not so lucky, and Grace was forced to adjust to life without him.
"Grace is convinced that she sees Henry everywhere and she’ll be so sure someone is him from the back… then they’ll turn around, and they look nothing like him and sometimes maybe they do look a little bit like him but it’s not him, and he’s dead. I didn’t know that everyone has experienced that until I wrote it, and now people are saying that they had a similar experience… You kind of want to see them so much that you believe you do… It’s your heart’s desire, you know, to whatever extreme that might be, and I’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of 'Can you will something into being?'"
In the book, after the initial shock passes, Grace begins to recover and pick up the pieces of her shattered life. She makes a seemingly innocuous call for a plumber to fix the boiler, but when he shows up looking exactly like Henry, Grace’s head starts to spin.
Eithne’s second book has already proven a huge success for her and is also being published in the US by Penguin next year - aptly enough providing her with some extra clout which she intends to spend bidding on a new house!
