Ciara Geraghty puts on her red shoes

Photo credit: Doreen Kilfeather

Ciara Geraghty’s new novel Now That I’ve Found You is out now in the UK, published by Hodder & Stoughton. We are glad to be one of the stops on her blog tour and have invited her to share some of her favorite things with us. This is Ciara's first visit to CLC, but we have reviewed two of her previous novels, Finding Mr. Flood and Lifesaving for Beginners.

To learn more about Ciara, visit her website or follow her on Twitter.

Synopsis of Now That I've Found You:
Vinnie Boland is a single father who is struggling to raise his teenage daughter and his young son on his own, with insistent help from his elderly mother. Vinnie’s wife – his childhood sweetheart – left the family over a year ago. One day, Vinnie has a panic attack while driving Ellen Woods – one of his regular taxi fares – to her weekly physiotherapy session. Ellen reluctantly drives Vinnie to the hospital. It’s the first time she has driven a car since a horrific car accident over a year before. This simple act, getting behind the wheel again, releases something in Ellen. The panic attack – its causes and its consequences – forces Vinnie to stop and think about his life. The pair embark on a cautious friendship. (Courtesy of Ciara's website.)

To hear Ciara talk about her latest novel, check out this video.

A few of my favourite things

My favourite book:

Anne Of Green Gables by LM Montgomery made a lasting impression on me. My mother recommended when I was a child and she took real pleasure from me reading it. She’d say ‘which bit are you at now?’ When I walked into the kitchen that day, she said, ‘He died, didn’t he?’ And she was right. Matthew had died. And I mourned his passing like he was a real, live person whom I had known personally. That’s the moment when I realised the impact books could have. The realness  of them. How they made you care. Empathise. Grieve. And I grieved for Matthew. I still do. I don’t think I’ll ever get over him.

My favourite quote:

“Ever tried? Ever failed? Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (Samuel Beckett)

I love this one. Failure is seen as such a disaster. And yet, the way Beckett puts it, it’s just another way of persevering. So, that’s what I do: I try to fail better.

My favourite film:

Shirley Valentine. I love the way Shirley talks to the wall and the rock, the fact that her friend is a hooker instead of the glamourous air-hostess Shirley always supposed her to be. The way she runs away and doesn’t come back, a notion that many of us – secretly – harbour. It makes me laugh every time. I feel better about the world afterwards.

My favourite - funeral - song:

“Let’s Dance” by David Bowie. I love dancing, I love red shoes, I’m not all that fond of funerals, especially my own, so the idea of people swaying in the aisles in red dancing shoes distracts me from the fact that I will, in fact, be dead.

My favourite smell:

Fresh cut grass. It’s so sweet, that smell, like cake. It reminds me of the beginning of the summer holidays when I was a kid and the summer stretched before me and seemed endless and full of possibilities.

My favourite piece of furniture:

My wooden rocking chair. My husband bought it for me when I was pregnant with our first baby, Sadhbh. I sat on it and rocked and placed my hands across my bump and entertained fanciful notions of what it might be like to be a mother. I fed each of my babies on the chair, rocked them in my arms when they woke in the night. It’s like a time machine. When I sit in in, I remember the past and imagine the future.

My favourite photograph:

There is a photograph of my husband a couple of days after our first baby was born. He is exhausted looking, sort of draped along the edge of the crib, as if he’s wishing he could take the baby out and climb in himself. The photograph makes me laugh, while also sending a pang through me, when I remember how young and hopeful and clueless we were.

My favourite piece of clothing:

The Aran cardigan I have that my great-aunt Una knit for my mother in 1965. My mother gifted it to me about ten years ago but she made me promise NEVER to wash it. I have to give it to her when it needs to be cleaned. She doesn’t trust me with the washing machine. And I can’t blame her; there have been laundry fatalities on my watch….

My favourite gadget:

My iPhone. It sort of changed my life, although I’m aware that that sounds a bit dramatic. But it narrowed the gap that had been growing for years between me and technology, because it was so easy to use and made social networking - an unknowable land beforehand - accessible to luddites like me.  My family laugh when I am looking for my phone because I never say, ‘Has anyone seen my phone?’ I say, ‘Has anyone seen my iPhone?’ I still say that. After all these years. 

My favourite possession:

My violin. It belonged to my grandfather and it’s reputed to be over a hundred years old. It’s a beautiful piece of wood and the sound it emits is so mellow, as if the years have smoothed and rounded it, been kind to it.

My favourite / death-row meal:

My mother’s lasagne. And baked Alaska – a feat of baking wizardry (you see, the icecream is INSIDE THE MERINGUE, like an unexpected ingot of gold. Last attempted in home economics class in Manor House School, circa 1985. Result: it perhaps lacked the finesse of presentation of many of the other offerings but it tasted like I imagine sophistication and intrigue might taste. I ate it with a teaspoon on the train home.

My favourite animal:

My dog Heidi. We adopted her when she was three (she’s six now). I call her our recession dog because her family emigrated to Abu Dhabi at the height of the recession and they couldn’t take her with them. She is possibly the only mammal in the world who loves me unconditionally.

Thanks to Ciara for visiting and to Hodder and Stoughton for including us on this blog tour. See below for all the stops.