Memory, Regrets & Disputed Facts: Sarah Gilmartin & Kathleen McMahon

Join Sarah Gilmartin and Kathleen McMahon as they discuss their new, gripping and finely observed novels with Andrea Carter.

Their work shares many themes, of the impact of deeply-buried family secrets, of the way memories and regrets of those families shape their children’s lives long into the future, and how the truths of the past become blurry the further they reach into the past.

Sarah Gilmartin is an Irish writer and arts journalist. Dinner Party is her first novel. She is the co-editor of the anthology Stinging Fly Stories and has an MFA from University College Dublin. She won Best Playwright at the inaugural Short+Sweet Dublin Festival. Her short stories have been published in The Dublin Review, The Tangerine and New Irish Writing. Her story The Wife won the Máirtín Crawford Award for Short Story 2020 at Belfast Book Festival. 

Praise for Service and Dinner Party:

‘Consummately done. The prose is clean, crisp, perfectly-filleted; the pace and tension perfectly controlled, to the very last page’ Lucy Caldwell, Patron of the Book Festival and author of Intimacies

‘One of the best Irish debuts I've read this year. A novel of family - full of warmth, insight, tragedy and, ultimately, how to survive it all...’ Rick O’Shea

'Sarah Gilmartin is a really wonderful storyteller. A writer here to stay' Joseph O'Connor

Kathleen MacMahon is a novelist, short story writer and journalist.  Her fourth novel, The Home Scar, was published in February 2023 to great critical acclaim. Her third novel, Nothing But Blue Sky, came out in 2020 and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times and The Lonely Crowd, among others. Her work has been translated into over twenty languages. As well as writing fiction, Kathleen is a newspaper columnist and occasional broadcaster. 

Praise for The Home Scar:

'A powerful story about legacy and loss and the possibility of reconciliation' Irish Times 

'A very grown-up novel about life and love, of course, and above all, the repercussions of a disrupted childhood . . . a real tour de force' Christine Dwyer Hickey

Andrea Carter is the author of The Inishowen Mysteries. She grew up in Ballyfin, Co. Laois, and graduated in Law from Trinity College, Dublin, before qualifying as a solicitor and moving to the Inishowen peninsula. Having practised law for nearly twenty years, more recently as a barrister, she now writes full time. Her books have been optioned for television and her short story “The Lamb” was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards in 2019. Death Writes, her sixth book will be published in July.