Cork author's novel has just hit the bookshelves

GRÁÍNNE Murphy is never not writing. Her third novel Winter People has just hit Cork bookshelves, but she already has another on the go, with a few more tucked away in the bottom drawer.

Her first two novels, Where The Edge Is and The Ghostlights, come highly recommended, both written in beautiful prose by a writer who bravely explores the intricacies of human relationships. Like her third offering, her previous novels are published by Legend Press in the UK, who approached the talented author after her nominations for various literary awards.

“I went straight to worry when I got the book deal,” she tells me over a coffee, “But then my son looked at me and said ‘Mum, this is your dream,’ so I got it together.”

Gráinne started writing seriously after the death of her daughter Ali. She worked on a non-fiction account of what had happened, wanting to remember and record the details of her baby’s short life, to preserve it for herself and her husband and for the remaining two of her three children.

“Time can be strange and treacherous. I had become used to condensing our story, mostly to make other people feel comfortable. Saying things like ‘our daughter died last year,’ so I felt compelled to write Ali’s story out.”

Once she began to write, the fiction followed.

“The fiction came alongside that, maybe to balance it out, to manage it.”

This third book, Winter People, is her first with literary agents Northbank Talent Management. She is extremely grateful to her personal agent Hannah Weatherill, who, oozing humility, she says made the book a lot better.

“Multiple point of view stories are my favourite ones to read, and to write, and Winter People is written this way too, moving from one character to the next. 

"Initially, I wrote the book in three parts, one part per character, but my agent reminded me I was expecting people to remember a lot for a long time. Now each part contains the perspectives of all three characters under the section headings of: Storm, Sea and Sky. It flows so much better this way.”

Murphy’s three characters sound fascinating. Two originally appeared in a short story she wrote called Further West, longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. It is from the point of view of a man called Peter who comes to repossess the home of Sis Cotter.

“Sis Cotter continued to live in my head long after the story had been written, and she overtook Peter within the story too. Later, she’d intrude on other novels, so I knew I had to write an entire story around her.”

Peter is still a sheriff repossessing Sis Cotter’s home in Winter People but their lives are fleshed out in vivid detail.

“They are three people living on a beach, which is an amalgam of all the beaches I know and love in West Cork. Sis Cotter is there, and Peter, and a woman called Lydia. But it was important for me that they live far apart on the beach – that there’s a sense of separation and isolation.”

The author explains that she wrote the novel during lockdown when she noticed how people were almost competing for sympathy, ranking their situation against other people.

“I wanted to convey that sense of judging someone’s life from the outside without really knowing what it’s like for someone. I wanted Sis and Lydia to look at each other that way.”

Her third character, Peter, was going to be another woman.

“I wanted to show a good man and I wanted to depict a good male friendship because I don’t think that gets enough space in writing.”

The writer confides that the story is about the things we need to say to one another in life. It considers what happens when we do or don’t.

“The biggest questions in life happen in the smallest moments. And when people change, that change tends to happen quite quickly. That’s one reason why my books always work within a short time frame. In my own life, Ali was diagnosed on a Monday night and by Tuesday morning I was a different person – I looked at the world differently.”

The hugely likeable, candid writer shares that she has thoroughly enjoyed writing in Cork since her family returned from Belgium several years ago.

“My first two novels came out in lockdown so that killed the possibility of community involvement but still, bookshops were brilliant. Any time I went into any Cork bookshop like Waterstones or Dubray or my local bookshops in Kinsale, they really made me feel welcome as a writer.”

She also mentions the great collaborative work of the Irish Writers’ Union, Cork City Library and Cork’s World Book Festival, commenting that everyone just wanted writers and bookshops to get through the pandemic.

Gráinne finishes our conversation by adding that the setting of Winter People is important.

“It is set on this desolate beach in November and that relates to the title. By ‘winter people’, I mean people who are happy to have the emotional door closed. That’s Sis Cotter. Summer people are happy to have the emotional door open. That’s Lydia.”

“And Peter?” I ask, shyly?

She offers me a smile – as if to say I’ll have to go away and read the book. She can count on it.