Join author Henrietta McKervey in conversation with Jan Carson to discuss her twisty, atmospheric novel The Woman in the Water.

Set between 1930s London and the windswept Cornwall coast, this gothic thriller dares to answer one of literature's abiding questions: in Daphne du Maurier's classic Rebecca, who is the woman in the water?

A splendidly evocative and unputdownable novel from a writer of breathtaking gifts Joseph O'Connor

Meet the Writers

Henrietta McKervey’s latest suspense thriller The Woman in the Water is inspired by a ‘lost’ character in Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 classic novel Rebecca. She is also the author of A Talented Man (2020), Violet Hill (2018), The Heart of Everything (2016), and What Becomes of Us (2015). She has a Hennessy First Fiction Award and won the inaugural Maeve Binchy Travel Award while studying for an MFA in Creative Writing at University College Dublin. Her Travel Award project, an exploration of the 31 sea areas of the Shipping Forecast, featured on RTÉ and BBC. She curates the annual ECHOES festival, programmed International Literature Festival Dublin 2025, and contributes on arts, culture and entertainment to the Irish Times, Sunday Independent and the Brendan O’Connor show on RTÉ Radio 1.

Jan Carson is a writer based in Belfast. She has published three novels, three short story collections and two micro-fiction collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. Jan’s latest novel, The Raptures was published by Doubleday in early 2022 and was subsequently shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her short story collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses was published by Doubleday (UK) in April 2024 and Scribner (US) in July 2024. Her writing has been aired on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and RTE. She is the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast 2025 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first stage play, an adaptation of the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit has been produced by Replay Theatre Company at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast in March 2025. Her next novel, Few and Far Between is forthcoming in April 2026.