Irish Times journalist Nuala O'Faolain has sold her first novel to Penguin for approximately £500,000 - although, she says, "I have barely begun and I have never before written one line of fiction in my life."
The story is about a middle-aged Irishwoman coming to terms with her Irishness and her womanhood and will be, she hopes, "a big, popular woman's novel."
She fully expects the novel to be ignored by the literary establishment. "I will probably join the great and happy throng of writers who are never reviewed," she says. She has written 100 pages and it was on the strength of these that Penguin bid for the novel at an auction in New York.
"We seem to be living in a time when publishing is in a particularly dynamic mood and there's no question but that being Irish at the moment is very fashionable," she says.
She has no idea how the book will turn out. "I know how it begins but I haven't been able to figure out what happens after that. An Irishwoman of about 50, who's lived in England most of her life, comes back to Ireland to explore a divorce case that happened among the landlord class in the 19th century and in the course of tracking it down and thinking about it, she comes to terms - in other words I haven't a clue what happens. With any luck she figures out something about herself as an Irishwoman and as a woman."
The £500,000 she will be paid over four years is, she says, "about the earnings of a successful Irish barrister over two years."
She says she owes it all to The Irish Times. In 1996, New Island Books published Are You Somebody?, a collection of her columns from the newspaper. Her 200-page autobiographical introduction created a sensation at the time and ensured the success of the book.
The book did well in the United States and, she says, "it's because of that that I've been given this great chance to enjoy my middle age." She has never written fiction before, "not one line, in my whole life."
Another Irish Times writer, John Connolly received a £350,000 sterling advance last year for his crime novel Every Dead Thing - published last month - and signed a $1 million contract for a US book deal.
And what of her future with The Irish Times? "I'd be very reluctant altogether to leave The Irish Times. Even a planetary success of a writer like Maeve Binchy has never severed her relationship with The Irish Times."