Binchy, Maeve

▪ Irish author

born May 28, 1940, Dublin, Ire.

      Irish journalist and author of best-selling novels and short stories about small-town Irish life. Noted as a superb storyteller, Binchy examined her characters and their relationships with wit and great understanding.

      Educated at University College, Dublin (B.A., 1960), Binchy taught school in Dublin from 1961 to 1968, when she began her career as a reporter for the daily Irish Times. Her earliest short stories, first published in two collections in 1978 and 1980 and republished collectively as London Transports in 1983, are closely observed portraits of the struggles of contemporary women.

      Binchy's first novel, Light a Penny Candle (1982), follows the friendship of two young women through two decades. Her second novel, Echoes (1985), tells of the struggle of an impoverished young woman to escape a narrow-minded, cruel resort town. In 1988 it was produced as a miniseries on British television. A third best-seller, Firefly Summer (1987), concerns an Irish American who is forced to reconsider his misconceptions about Ireland when he goes there to live. Binchy also wrote the short-story collections Maeve Binchy's Dublin Four (1982), The Lilac Bus (1984), and This Year It Will Be Different and Other Stories: A Christmas Treasury (1996) and several plays for the stage and television. Her later novels include Silver Wedding (1988), the story of a couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary and the events that led them there; Circle of Friends (1991; filmed 1995), about a pair of friends who attend university in Dublin; Tara Road (1998; filmed 2005), in which two women, one Irish, one American, try to improve their lives by trading houses; Nights of Rain and Stars (2004), a tale of vacationers in Greece who are linked by a shared tragedy; and Heart and Soul (2008), about a doctor who establishes a clinic in an underserved area, while trying to juggle her own affairs.

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