Secrets of a Happy Marriage

Travel Guide

Lisowen

The author might have set her novel here but her version of it is very different to the reality – there is no castle for  a start! Cathy Kelly says – “I love Ireland and all the tiny villages, like the one in the West of Ireland where I spent all my summer and Christmas holidays as a child. It had a church, a small shop, a pub (naturally) and then that was it. My granny didn’t have a car, so during the summer, we’d walk at a brisk pace the few miles to Mass on Sundays or for funerals. I went to a lot of funerals and in true Irish rural form, saw many a corpse laid out. Which was probably good in that it does prepare you for the concept of death….”

The school in this small town links many of the women in the story. Faenia grew up here and went to the school. It had been a wooden-framed school where Isobel also went. Isobel stays in Kerry and marries a man who is a police sergeant in Lisowen itself.

Despite Faeina moving to America later on, she still remembers her childhood home with affection.

“The tiny town, with great swathes of green, shades of glorious trees bent by the Atlantic, rocky fields leading down to the darkening sea, and the stone monolith of the castle standing feudally over it all, the small farms scattered around like windfall apples dropped from a great tree.”

Cari is a book editor in London and we get a peak inside the world of publishing. Amy works in New York City, Trina in a shop in Dublin…there’s locations to suggest time and space away from each other but Liscowen in Ireland is the draw for them all.