Keepsake and Ariadna

I got an email recently from a woman called Ariadna. She lives in Argentina but was visiting Kilkenny. She wandered into Dubray Books and  asked them for books written by Kilkenny writers. They pulled out Keepsake (thank you Dubrays!) She tracked me down and sent me an email (which she has given me permission to reproduce here). Hopefully no direct spoilers but here goes..

Hello!

My name is Ariadna, and I’m from Argentina. I’ve visited Kilkenny with my husband two months ago and while there I started searching for books from local authors. I love reading and I love Ireland, so I just HAD to take home some local books with me. I came into this bookstore (Dubray Books) and I asked one of the guys there for a book written by someone from Kilkenny, and he showed me “Keepsake”. He told me you were not born in Kilkenny but you’ve been living there for a while, and in fact if I recall correctly you had been there a couple of days earlier, signing books. A pity I missed my chance! But I do have my signed copy

I got to say, I loved this book. I love horses (they’re my favorite animals, along with dogs) and I just fell in love with your story. I cried my eyes out when I read about May and how sad Granny was (oh yeah, I cried, I’m 33 years old by the way!) I’ve just finished it, but I’ll keep it forever in my memory. I will totally look for your other books (I still don’t know what it is about but I love the name “The sleeping Baobab tree” – I love trees too! Hehehe).

I just wanted to tell you how much I loved this story. I’ve just told my husband that he totally needs to read it.

Thank you for writing this!

Aridna

Lovely that someone took the time to write this ... So, for Ariadna, here is a picture of a Baobab Tree.

Launching Keepsake

This week sees the launch of my new book Keepsake, published by the lovely Little Island crew!.  It will be launched in Stonehouse Books, courtesy of bookseller extraordinaire Liz Walsh, on Thursday 25th May at 7.00 pm. It is hard to describe your own book (at least I think it is), but I will try.

It is a tale set in Ireland (in a fictional town called Carrigcapall) and concerns a boy and his horse and a girl and her granny. There are other characters (both human and four legged) who wander in and out of the story - but these four matter most. Three of the characters love horses and that's a pretty lucky turn of events for Storm, the horse, whose life is in danger.

As I work from character maybe I will leave the description at that for the meantime. Mary Esther Judy, children's bookseller at Charlie Byrnes Bookshop in Galway, was the first person to review the book in her brilliant blog Fallen Star Stories  and you can find it here.

I have been lucky enough to have a primary school down the road from me reading the book pre publication - St John's Senior in Kilkenny. They selected the book as their One School, One Book project and have been doing mighty work on it for the past few weeks. One of the teachers at the school, the inimitable Orla Mackey, prepared a Keepsake workbook for the students with all sorts of wondrous and creative ideas in it. These notes will be available on the Little Island website as well as on Seomra Ranga, and I will put up a link to both on my own website.

Here is some of their work!