Nuala O'Faolain – författare

Kathleen de Burca is a travel writer based in London. The office is the nearest thing she has to a home. When a quick series of blows strips away the props of her life, she is faced with the frightening imperative of change. In her crisis she decides to investigate a true story about a relationship so passionate that it burned its way across the barriers of class and culture -- a scandalous affair between the wife of an English landlord and an Irish servant during the devastation of Ireland''s potato famine. After an absence of thirty years, Kathleen returns to Ireland to research the story and begins a journey that leads her not only into the historical past, but into a reconsideration of the family she fled years ago. While back in Ireland, she meets a lover of her own who presents her with a choice that promises to alter the course of her life. As she moves toward her decision, she calls on the strengths of her identity as a woman, an Irish woman, and a woman who is no longer young. Meanwhile, she brings the story of the long-ago lovers to a denouement as tender as it is tragic. My Dream of You explores the extremes of passion, the depths of loneliness, and the resilience of the human heart.

"A biography with narrative muscle and thrilling historical relevance." -Kirkus ReviewsLegend says that May Duignan was tall with red-gold hair and big blue eyes, and that she was compellingly attractive to men. At 19, she stole her family’s savings and ran away from home in rural Ireland to America, where she worked as a confidence trickster, a thief, a showgirl, and a prostitute, notorious as much for her violence as for her diamond rings. The tabloids dubbed her “The Queen of the Underworld.” Reaching across decades for points of connection, Nuala O’Faolain, the bestselling author of Almost There and My Dream of You, brings sympathetic scrutiny to the understanding of an outlaw experience like no other. 

Upon its original publication in 1996, Are You Somebody? quickly became an cultural sensation in Ireland, sparking an ‘emotional episode in public life in Ireland’. O’Faolain’s striking candour and focus on the long‑silenced experiences of Irish women helped the book become an international bestseller.Are You Somebody? is an extraordinary memoir that explores identity, love and the search for meaning in a changing Ireland. Nuala O’Faolain shares her life with unflinching honesty – her struggles, triumphs and the questions that shaped her journey.This is more than a memoir; it’s a conversation about what it means to live fully, to question deeply and to embrace vulnerability.

Nuala O’Faolain’s first memoir Are You Somebody? became a literary sensation and an international bestseller when it was first published by New Island Books in 1996. It launched a new life for its author, at a time when she had long since let go of expectations that anything new could dislodge patterns of regret and solitude.A pioneering work of literary memoir, Almost There opens at that moment when O’Faolain’s life began to change. It tells the story of a life in subtle, radical, and unforeseen renewal. It is a tale of good fortune chasing out bad – of an accidental harvest of happiness. But it is also a provocative examination of one woman’s experience of the ‘crucible of middle age’ – a time of life that faces in two directions, that forges the shape of the years to come, and also clarifies and solidifies one’s relationships to friends and lovers, family and self.Nuala O’Faolain’s final memoir, Almost There chronicles the pursuit of artistic and personal integrity, and what it is to be a woman in contemporary society, with the signature style and raw candidness of her personal writing.