Róisín Ingle

Jan is a really wonderful writer.

She weaves this story, mixing fact and fiction, and really the whole thing is an extended metaphor for the fortunes of Northern Ireland since the peace process

where no matter how hard people try to bury the past, it always comes back to the surface.

Jan joined us on Zoom from Belfast to talk about the novel, but also about her childhood growing up in an evangelical household in Ballymena.

Her approach to everything is so nuanced, and I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation.

Jan, thank you very much for coming on to the Women's Podcast.

The idea for your new book, Few and Far Between, came from an email from a friend.

And I think I had the subject line, this sounds like something you might want to write about.

What was in the email and how did it become your latest novel?

So he wanted a seventh county and he wanted to use this massive lake, Lough Neagh.

And just tell us about Lough Neagh for people who don't know, because I think a lot of people wouldn't have been there.

So when you started looking into Terence O'Neill's madcap idea to create the seventh county by draining the loch, it just fires your imagination.

And you've created this book that...

And I have to be honest, if you'd have told me you'd written a novel about Loch Nye and people living on islands in the middle of it, it wasn't that appealing.

But you've done an incredible job of really creating a world that is absolutely compelling.

And I think anyone who picks up this book and starts to read it is going to just love it.

I think it's fantastic.

But tell me about the archipelago and the ark and the creation of these islands.

Because if he had it drained, if he had been successful, which he wasn't, there would have been these islands emerging from...

But also the other thing that drives the book and is a big part of it is the real life environmental crisis that's happening in Lough Neagh because we've all heard about that kind of toxic algae that's blooming there.