Steph - it was excellent. The author is a former BBC producer, she's apparently only written short stories before. She started this book in 2006, had it rejected loads of times, eventually put it away in a drawer - then a friend of hers urged her to submit it to the Dundee International Book Prize competition and it won.
It seems that the book is set in Ireland, mainly in the early 1980s - at a time when Irish society was at last starting to change. As female voices began to be heard - even though only faintly - some men displayed what Nicola White calls 'an almost Gothic' fear of women - one bishop apparently said 'there is no more dangerous place to be than in a woman's womb'. There were three referenda on the pro-life issue - NOT with a view to legalising abortion, but to make it even more illegal than it was already. Each one succeeded.
The novel is about a 17 year old girl who finds the body of a newborn baby in the grounds of her school. It eventually links back to events in her childhood and to other babies. Nicola, who was brought up partly in Dublin and partly in New York City, had read a lot about two famous events - the 'Kerry babies' and the death of another girl who had given birth at the age of 15, alone and outside in a freezing cold January. Nobody ever disclosed who the father of the baby was and nobody in the town where she lived would admit even to having realised that the poor girl was pregnant.
Nicola wanted to explore the position of women in Irish society, and the contradictions displayed in a country that adamantly rejected a woman's right to choose, but also treated unmarried mothers with such callous cruelty (you may have seen The Magdalene Sisters, which is set only 10 years before this novel and which was also based very firmly in fact.) She said that, at that time, the most vociferous pro-lifers were men but they were not ever held responsible for births out of wedlock, nor were they ever ostracised by their own communities.
As someone who visited rural Ireland frequently around that time, this all rings true to me. The RC church still had a grip of iron in those days, and it was a very patriarchal society.
She wanted to set the story within a clear structure, so she chose the crime/thriller genre - she said that novels she had started in the past had a habit of just drifting on with nothing ever happening, and she recalled having to pitch other people's work to her BBC bosses, who would always say 'that's all well and good, but what's the STORY?' So this novel has a mystery element and a police detective with his own back story, whom she plans to use in subsequent books.
It was a very enjoyable evening and I think I am now going to have to buy the book, as the library doesn't have it and I've been left wanting to know more, which is surely the mark of a good author event.
Rosemary
