The Story Behind the Story:

Since I was a very young girl, I have lived by the guidance of stories. And in Irish culture, stories are food for the soul.  

I believed in banshees and faeries who lived in the hollows of the oak trees that grew in my backyard. I had a pet Irish Wolfhound named Cú, after the Celtic folkore hero, Cú Cuhlainn.  

In short, the veil through which I look upon the world is adorned with these stories — some true, and many, in good Irish fashion, half true.  

Me and my sister with my grandfather on Grafton Street circa 2005!

This project began shortly after my family lost the best storyteller in our home and my greatest hero, my grandfather, Mark Brennan.  

“Papa,” as we kids called him, was a man of many tales, a man who’d lived many lives and who knew how to command a room with just a slight wiggle of his eyebrows.  

His life was nothing short of extraordinary.  

And the way I see it, stories are borne of truth. Or… half-truths in this case.  

Born in Bray, Ireland, 1939, my grandfather spent his younger years by the seaside playing with his eleven brothers and sisters, enjoying the company of the sand and seashells, his childhood nothing short of idyllic.  

But as with any great hero, the ascent to success and stability is not an easy one.  

Much like this story, my grandfather’s father passed shortly after his forty second birthday, not long after the end of the Second World War.  

Without the patriarch, turbulence set in, and soon it was up to my grandfather to figure his own way through life.  

And so he did.  

Finding his way to Dublin first, my grandfather, like Finn, worked in coal for a few years before he’d saved enough money to emigrate to London where he took up work selling ‘hoovers’ door-to-door while living in London’s east end.  

While their two stories certainly deviate at this point (Finn’s experience with London’s underbelly an entirely imagined plot), in Finn, I sought to impart the undying resilience that my grandfather carried  — a sort of refusal to be anything less than what he believed himself capable of.  

In short, I wrote this novel as though I were looking through that aforementioned veil of woven stories, peering through truth and embellishment, knotting history and fable, all the while tucking kernels of his philosophies within Finn as he navigates the mud of 1950s London with nowhere and no one to call home.  

But home finds itself in curious places, sometimes in the last place you’d expect.  

So brings me to the second half of this acknowledgement: to my Grandma, my Papa’s wife, Greta Brennan, the inspiration for my Margaret Baumann.  

Ever regal, though all too humble to admit it, my grandmother was my grandfather’s guiding force, an ever steady partner in which he found his way home. As much as this story is for him, it is for her as well. An avid reader like myself, often suggesting my favourite reads of the year, my grandmother has been a steady force in aiding the development of this project and my writing endeavours.  

Through all the ups and downs of his life, my grandmother remained a beacon of hope and love for my grandfather and our family, a true testament to the power of love, and how sometimes all we need is one person to believe in us for the most unlikely of things to happen. Without her by his side, my grandfather’s life would have told a much different story, and I am wholly confident that he would agree his life’s success is entirely dedicated to her unwavering poise and strength.  

My grandfather & grandmother — the real life Finn & Margaret.