I never planned to write this book. I also never planned to write its predecessor, After the Wedding. Both are set on the same small island off the Kerry coast which I’ve called Roone, and which is loosely based on Valentia Island. The first book I set on Roone, One Summer, which was published in 2012, was supposed to be the only book set there.
But when I’d written the first draft (having been inspired to use an island location after a month-long stay on Valentia in November 2010) I showed it to my editor, who suggested I quirk it up a little by adding a sort of otherworldly quality to the island. Put a bit of magic into it, she said, so after scratching my head for a while I did as I was told and stirred things up a little, and Roone became the island where things happened that couldn’t be explained. A road sign appeared that nobody had erected – pointing out to sea, with Statue of Liberty 3,000 miles written on it – and it reappeared every time Kerry County Council sent someone over to remove it. An apple tree on the island bore fruit all year round. At the cemetery, people smelt chocolate, or oranges. You get the picture. Things were different on Roone.
And here’s the thing (and yes, I am fully aware how utterly daft this will sound): as soon as I started on this second, quirkier draft, the book seemed to become . . . for want of a better word, enchanted in some way. (Yes, yes, I hear it too.) The characters inhabited the story in a far more real way than any of my previous characters had; they became real entities to me. The logical part of me knew that they were figments of my imagination – and yet they felt like something more. Look, I can’t explain it, any more than the inhabitants of Roone could explain apples growing in February, but just as they shrugged their shoulders and accepted that strange things happened on their island, I decided to accept that for some reason, this cast of characters was becoming something more than a set of imagined beings to me. Midway through the book I had to kill off a character: I was truly grief-stricken (he was lovely.)
What’s more, writing the second draft was incredibly easy: there was no struggle with it, no tweaking and rewriting and cutting and agonising like there would normally be. It was almost as if, once I’d decided to imbue Roone with this otherworldliness, the islanders breathed a sigh of relief, and things just fell into place. I’d go so far as to say they wrote the second draft themselves, and I was just their conduit, but then you’d really have me committed.
And then One Summer was published, and it became my biggest selling book, and garnered countless requests for a sequel, which had never entered my head. No, I told everyone, I was working on something new that had no connection at all with One Summer, and I had no plans to go back there. But all through the months of writing Something in Common, I was aware that the Roone residents hadn’t in fact gone away.
This had never happened before. When I finished a book, I could always let it go, despite its characters having lived in my head for the year or so it had taken me to write it. Not so this time – these ones were still in my head, and refusing to leave – so after the publication of Something in Common, I decided the only thing to do was to revisit Roone and write a new story, and call it After the Wedding, and set it two years later.
It was like reuniting with lost friends. Going back to Roone felt like coming home. But what do you know? History only went and repeated itself. After the Wedding was published in 2014, and all through the writing of Two Fridays in April, my subsequent, unrelated book, I found myself once again unable to shake off those pesky islanders. So what could I do but go back again and write I’ll Be Home for Christmas, once Two Fridays had been put to bed?
This time it’s different. For one thing, it’s set in December – the other two concerned themselves with the summer months – and it spans just over a week, beginning three days before Christmas and finishing up on the eve of New Year’s Eve. I’ve brought in a new character, a young 17-year-old from Australia who is making the journey alone from Brisbane to Roone with a heart full of fear and hope, and without a clue as to how she’ll be received there.
The overriding theme of I’ll Be Home for Christmas, given the time of year that’s in it, is families, and all the love and heartbreak and angst and laughter that they can bring along with them. Within the theme there is marital discord, and an uneasy in-law relationship, and an adoptee tracing her birth family, and a daughter struggling with an emotionally distant father. I’ve run the family gamut with this one, and I’m worn out from it. (The irony is that I come from a lovely, big, happy family who all get along: just as well I have an imagination.)
This will probably be the last book in what has become the Roone series: but knowing how tenacious those islanders are, I’m not ruling anything out. Obviously, I know Roone like the back of my hand at this stage. It’s out there somewhere, I’m convinced of it (maybe slightly to the left of Valentia), waiting to be discovered by cartographers – or maybe deliberately hiding from them. In fact, a group of faithful readers and myself are planning a bus trip there one of the days. In the summer, we’ve decided, probably to coincide with the annual island beach barbecue, which sounds like a whole lot of fun. Maybe we’ll see you there.
I'll be Home for Christmas is published today by Hachette Ireland, priced £12.99
