I was thrilled when Emily Zinkin from Head of Zeus invited me to join the Ruby Flynn blog tour. Ruby Flynn is a lovely book set in Ireland and Liverpool and I'm delighted to share a special guest post from the author, Nadine Dorries, in which Nadine talks about her inspiration behind Ruby Flynn.
Guest post from Nadine Dorries - the inspiration behind Ruby Flynn:
When I finished writing The Four
Streets trilogy, I knew, I had to write something completely
different. My editor would not describe those words as music to her
ears. If you write a novel and it becomes a number one bestseller,
what your publisher wants you to keep doing, is to keep writing more
of the same. The fact was that The Four Streets trilogy was such an
emotionally powerful journey for me, that I felt as though I had to
set my next novel in a place I truly loved and where I had spent the
best days of my life, in a remote village on the west coast of
Ireland. I was born in 1950’s Liverpool, the granddaughter of an
Irish grandmother, Nellie Deane, who never stopped missing home and
so every time she won on the bingo, she would scoop me up, kidnap me
and take me home. To her home, a blissfully rural cottage still
standing today. This had many advantages for me. I had my own donkey,
Jacko. There were no boundaries to the streams and fields and
mountains I could roam and play in. I learnt how to milk a cow, stack
a haystack, beat the midges and fell asleep at night in front of the
fire listening to the adults chattering and telling stories they had
all heard before.
In the graveyard, there was a
headstone, which haunted me. It was on a grave of two brothers who
had died in their cottage in the snow of ’47. A notorious winter
in the weather history of the Atlantic Coast. Returning to the
village following the publication of The Ballymara Road, I revisited
the graveyard and the stone ignited something in the adult me and
that was where the first idea of Ruby Flynn came to me, when I was
stood on a mountainside cemetery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. In
Ruby Flynn, I have kept all the original village names, and each
description is of a place that exists.
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