Powerful story inspired by day job in journalism

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

RTÉ journalist Rachael English, like her newsroom colleagues, is working from home these days when on Morning Ireland duty. That’s also what she does in her other life as a novelist, but they are entirely different disciplines, she says.

Her most recent book, The Paper Bracelet, is a moving, ultimately uplifting story of Katie, a former nurse in a mother and baby home who sets out to reunite mothers with the babies they were forced to give up for adoption many years before.

This book, published by Hachette Ireland a couple of weeks before the Covid-19 shutdown began, is a page-turner as it deals with serious, heart-breaking issues in an engaging, accessible, humane and sometimes humorous way.

“What a difference a month makes,” she says as she explains how The Paper Bracelet evolved from a previous novel, The American Girl, which explored how one woman uncovered the secrets of her past.

“I became more interested in the subject and heard stories from several people, and began thinking about this character who goes around helping people. She turned into Katie, but it took time.”

That’s because Rachael wrote another book in between and was working on a different one again.

Then, she had a moment of inspiration that unlocked this story.

“It came to me one day when I was changing a bed,” she recalls with a hearty laugh.

“I said, ‘I’ll write that down so I don’t forget it’ and I mentioned it to a couple of people who said ‘you have to write that’, so I abandoned the other book!”

It remains abandoned because she has now embarked on a different story about three generations of Irish women that reaches back to the Great Famine and the workhouse in Kilkee.

Dublin-based Rachael is originally from Shannon in County Clare and cut her broadcasting teeth at Clare FM. She’s researching the history of that workhouse online as travelling to Kilkee isn’t possible under lockdown. She’s yearning for a blast of Atlantic air but it can’t be done, she says.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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