THE FIRST FIVE PAGES
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International bestseller Carmel Harrington describes setting the scene for her sweeping new generational saga, The Girl from Donegal
I write standalone family dramas, often with dual timelines. The furthest I’ve gone back to, up to now, has been the 1980s. But my eleventh novel, The Girl From Donegal, became a new departure for me, as it’s my first book with a historical strand. It wasn’t a conscious decision to write historical fiction.
The story led me there.
The Girl From Donegal is set between 1939 and the present day. It was inspired by an online snippet I read in a BBC historical archive. The piece spoke about an Irish woman who left her home in 1939 to marry a stranger, starting a new life in Bermuda. I was struck by her spirit of adventure and could not stop thinking about what that journey to a new world might have looked and felt like for her.
I also found myself thinking about rural Ireland then, as the world teetered on the brink of WWII, fast on the heels of the devastation and loss of the Irish War of Independence. I’ve always been a history geek, and this period of unrest has fascinated me since I was a child. I started reading further archival accounts of Ireland, and my research brought me to a passenger liner, the SS Athenia. This ship brought many Irish to a new life in America and Canada – and, for some, to Bermuda. I knew I had to include the real-life events that happened onboard that ship in 1939 in my story, which became an integral part of the plot. A story emerged, with characters almost perfectly formed. That of an epic love story between the past and the present, filled with tragic secrets and mysteries.