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Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space.

'In Country' is about a high school girl's quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.

I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book.

My family life reads a bit like 'Little House on the Prairie.' I was big sister to Joan, Renee, and brother William, and we grew up in Dalkey, a little town 10 miles outside of Dublin. It was a secure, safe and happy childhood, which was meant to be a disadvantage when it comes to writing stories about family dramas.

I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you're going to be an Irish writer.

When I was young, all the books were about a Mary Jane and the football player and the prom and ending up with the quiet guy and making your mom happy.

'Forever Amber,' written by Kathleen Winsor in 1944, was banned in Boston at the time of its publication as obscene and offensive. This alone would have been enough to excite my interest, but in 1956, it was sitting inoffensively on the shelves of the small country library on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii, where my family spent its summers.

I have on my bookshelf a book called 'Movie Monsters' by Alan Ormsby, a kids' book I got when I was in kindergarten. It started there.

Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.