Jen Bray doesn’t strike you as the kind of person to get nervous before an interview. A former political correspondent with The Irish Times and current political editor with The Sunday Times Ireland, Bray has interviewed taoisigh, navigated live primetime television as a guest on The Late Late Show, and anchored podcasts. She has carved out a role in the public eye for most of her working life.
Yet there’s something different about this interview, as Bray herself concedes. She has arrived at this city-centre Dublin hotel – dressed in fashionable black, with wide-framed glasses – to talk not about politics, but about herself: her story, her life, her writing. “I’ve been mentally preparing myself to open up,” she says. “When I was getting so anxious about book publicity, I had to examine: why am I so anxious?”
The fear is coming from a specific place, which we’ll get to shortly. But first there’s the question of her debut novel The Lies Between Us, a marvellously twisty matryoshka doll of a crime story, with shades of Agatha Christie and Liz Nugent in the stylings.
Three warring sisters: former garda Lucy, novelist Susannah, and unhappy middle sister Tara – are meeting for a peacemaking dinner in Dunmore East, where their mother has a holiday home. But when Susannah disappears, and a body of a woman is found on the shore nearby, the family are drawn into a mystery that has its roots in a dark and complicated past.
The book has already won praise from her peers (“Outstanding,” said Jane Casey.
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