Dervla McTiernan

Well, I've been here 14 and a half years.

Look, I think the first books were set in Ireland because I was so homesick.

You know, I was living in Australia, adapting to the weather and the sunlight and raising kids here and missing Galway terribly.

And Galway was still the place I knew better than anywhere else in the world.

I think it was really natural to set books there.

But I set two novels in the US and partly that was like a market thing.

I had my publisher in the US wanted US set novels.

And then in time, they just opened up and they were much more flexible and they were happy for me to write a book anywhere.

And I think that just combined with a growing interest in Melbourne and the fact that this idea was really a city set book and it just all came together.

know we we thought we were going for five years like so many other people and then look I mean opportunity Australia's been very kind to us as a country my husband's a civil engineer so for his work and I wasn't a writer before I came over here I had been a lawyer but I started writing and and the Australian writing community and and book selling community kind of embraced me and the children are really Australian now Freya was born in Ireland but our son was born here and and over time it just kind of became more obvious that this was where we were going to settle.

We talked about it briefly when our daughter was going into secondary school because we thought, OK, this is probably the last opportunity.

But at the time, it just wouldn't have made any sense for us.

And since then, I think I've just had to try and slowly convince myself that this is it.

I still struggle with it sometimes with the idea that it's forever.

It's not that I don't love Australia because I do, but there's a part of me that will always feel that Ireland is home.

That you could... That is absolutely the dream for everybody.

I think we all dream of the perfect retirement where we can do half and half.

Whether or not that ever happens, who knows?

It was something that bubbled up and eventually I kind of realised where some of that bubble came from.

But I didn't know, I didn't realise it when I was writing the book.