IF you thought Alice Taylor's tales of rural life only have a purely Irish appeal you couldn't be more wrong. The Cork-born writer's five autobiographical books, which include To School Through The Fields and Quench the Lamp, have now sold an astonishing one million copies - and that's worldwide. America is, predictably enough, her biggest market outside Ireland, but Japan is fast becoming the second biggest.
Two of her books are already bestsellers there and - surprisingly for such local-based stories her Japanese translator had trouble coming to grips with only four things in Alice's books - the Stations, Gaelic football, Nelson's Pillar and transubstantiation (admittedly not a word that would crop up regularly in most popular books). In the Japanese versions, each is explained with copious footnotes.
On Thursday, Alice and her husband Gabriel Murphy came to Dublin with their family for a celebratory reception at the National Library to launch new and very stylish editions of her books. The US Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith was there, as was Veronica Sutherland, the British ambassador. Surprisingly, given the writer's enormous success and the trend among publishers for holding big launch parties for even the slimmest volume, this was Alice's first formal launch. All her other books were released without any fanfare at all.
After five autobiographical books and a children's book, she is now working on her first novel.