Showing results by narrator "Heather O' Neill" in All Categories

Late summer near Dublin, 1920, and up at the great house there are still cucumber sandwiches for tea. Slipping away from Aunt Mary and dotty Grandfather, 18-year-old Nancy has escaped down to the shore to dream in the beach hut - longing for her life to begin.

Struggling to cope with urban life - and with life in general - Frankie, a 20-something artist, retreats to the rural bungalow on 'turbine hill' that has been vacant since her grandmother's death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by nature, that she hopes to regain her footing in art and life. She spends her days pretending to read, half listening to the radio, failing to muster the energy needed to leave the safety of her haven. Her family come and go until they don't, and she is left alone to contemplate the path that led her here and the smell of the carpet that started it all.

Jessica Taylor is walking her dog in the rain when she meets the man of her dreams only to be struck by lightning moments later. When she wakes up in the hospital, the doctors insist she's someone else: Lauren Richardson, wife and mother of four. Laurens husband wants nothing more than for life to get back to normal - complete with a well-organized house and very properly behaved children. But Lauren's kids haven't been allowed to have much fun, and one of them has special needs. Can Jessica embrace this family of strangers and become the wife and mother they need?

She has a fulfilling career, a wide friendship group, a supportive family, a lovely boyfriend, and quite nice hair. So why does Lynn Enright's life seem to be missing something? Why, she wonders, does she still care so much about getting married? Armed with a suspicion that she is not the only one, she sets out to explore the role marriage plays for women of her generation. It's an outdated institution, which seems to fail so very often - so why are we still in thrall to the idea of being wed?

Amidst the 1971 Troubles between the Irish Republican Army and Northern Ireland, 12-year-old Finn lives in a world of her own of fairy tales. Raised by her grandmother, Nuala, who is the village storyteller, Finn spends her days playing make-believe in the forest, weaving tall tales to tell her friend Darcy, longing to go to the island of Inis Eala to meet the swans there, and waiting for her father to return from the war. She's long since stopped believing in happy endings and miracles, preferring to believe instead in serendipity, or "happy mistakes".