Sadbh skipped across the pond on Monday for a book launch that was simply unmissable: the bash to celebrate the paperback publication of Maeve Binchy's Tara Road, which in one great leap has gone straight from the presses to the top of the best-seller lists. Anthony Cheetham, chief executive of publishers Orion, had guests gasping over their champagne when he said that not only had the hardback sold 900,000, the paperback had sold a million copies though it's only on sale a matter of days.
The location was one of the snazziest garden emporiums in London, the Chelsea Gardener on Sydney Street, where literati and friends and family chatted to each other under the flowering oleander, bamboo and trailing ivy.
The reason for the exotic location was that simultaneously being launched was Rosa Gordon Snell, the rose Maeve had named for her husband, writer Gordon Snell, for his birthday. With a hue described as "floribunda yellow flushed with scarlet", it took Gordon a while to take it all in when Maeve first told him some months back of her floricultural plan. Rosa Gordon Snell will soon be in gardens and buttonholes all over the land.
Douglas Kennedy was there prior to heading for South Africa to promote his own novel The Job, as was his wife Grace Carley. Just back from Cannes with her company Stranger than Fiction, she'd been selling such films as Final Cut, South Paw and A Love Divided. Also in the throng were Rosie de Courcy, Maeve's long-time editor, and Judge Ricki Johnson and his wife Nuala over from Dublin, the judge reminiscing about dancing with Maeve when she was 14 in Ballybunion and devilling as a young barrister with her father. And there too among the palm trees was none other than Noggs, literary diarist with the Daily Telegraph, musing on the lean pickings for his column at launches that weren't as lively as Maeve's. Come to Ireland Noggs, we said, where you can hardly walk down the street without falling upon a book launch or a poetry reading. And, as we made our way into the Chelsea night, Orion revealed the good news: there'll be a new novel from Maeve Binchy by September.
`There was no Yeats," huffed Sean O'Faolain. "I saw him invent himself." It was this comment, made to author Brenda Maddox, which started her writing her biography of poet W.B., George's Ghosts, from which she read in Waterstones in Dublin on Tuesday night. Maddox was introduced by fellow writer Nuala O'Faolain, who had originally met Brenda in her previous incarnation as "a major guru of the telecommunications world" working with the Economist. "Does your wife ever write about anything but radar?" was the comment that started Maddox writing biographies in the first place.
Nora, her best-selling portrait of Joyce's wife, more than proved that she did, and after the reading Brenda was heading up to a film set on Sheriff Street where director Pat Murphy has just started filming an adaptation of the book. Asked about actor Ewan McGregor playing the part of J. Joyce, Maddox replied with a twinkle: "I'm delighted he's doing it and I'm delighted for him that he has something interesting to do after Star Wars."
Regardless of whether the sun shines there will be a large number of Irish making Hay this year at the Sunday Times Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye which started yesterday and continues until next weekend. This year the Irish contingent will be led on to the field by historian Ruth Dudley Edwards who is sure to pack out the marquee when she and David Trimble discuss her new study of the Orange Order, The Faithful Tribe, tomorrow in the Middle Tent at 2.10 p.m.
Other Irish interest includes Colm Toibin, discussing The Modern Library; first time novelist Antonia Logue; Edna O'Brien, who will be talking about her new biography of James Joyce reviewed elsewhere on these pages by Terence Killeen; Brenda Maddox on the Yeats book and Marian Keyes. Those who were lucky enough to catch novelist Vikram Seth singing in Hodges Figgis in Dublin recently will probably be eager to hear more - he is performing with chamber musicians in the Salem Chapel at Hay tonight.
The keynote speaker at the festival is Christopher Hitchens, the brilliantly belligerent Vanity Fair journalist, and other big names include Tom Wolfe, and Antonia Fraser on Oliver Cromwell.
Aeron Thomas, who besides being a published poet herself, is also the daughter of Dylan Thomas, swept into Dublin this week to support Bill Long who was celebrating the publication of his book, Brief Encounters: Meetings With Remarkable People, in the Dublin Writer's Museum on Wednesday. The junior poetic Thomas is in the midst of writing a book of memoirs about her father and mother, Caitlin Thomas, and their life in the Boathouse in Larne, which is now the Dylan Thomas museum.