At the moment I am working on two manuscripts.
One tells the story of a policeman from the City of London force, wounded at sea in the First World War and subsequently seconded to the South African Police at a time when considerable tensions existed between the ethnic groups. Will he overcome his own doubts and shortfalls and fit into the new, unfamiliar society? Or will the fact of his origins never let him simply become “one of the boys”? Set against the background of Cape Town in the 1920s, the story unfolds against simmering industrial unrest and a white population divided not only against itself, but also distanced from the larger surrounding indigenous majority.
My other current project is the story of a small, rather isolated community in the extreme south-west of the country in County Cork. The time is 1957, the Irish Free State is barely 30 years old and the notion of “modernization” has yet to descend over the more remote areas and the people living there. Emigration is on the rise, work is as scarce as a leprechaun’s crock of gold and the way of life in remote rural areas has not progressed much beyond the time of an Gorta Mór, the Great Famine. The settlement of Killgowan, with a livelihood closely connected to the sea and a picturesque location along an inlet that even the Ordinance Survey has not bothered to name, is a case in point…
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