Romance: In the course of her work as a reporter for the BBC, Roisin McAuley has made documentaries on subjects as diverse as animal rights, the Intifada, and cholera in Peru.
She has worked in Sarajevo and Angola; she has undergone anti-chemical warfare training; she has interviewed Yasser Arafat. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that her first venture into fiction turns out to be informed, intelligent and humane. What is a surprise is the genre: one might not expect McAuley to devote herself to romance fiction.
But though it is firmly situated in the easy-reading league, Singing Bird deals with some tough topics.
Lena Molloy and her husband, Jack, have a profitable business and affluent friends. They live in a rambling old house in London; their daughter, Mary, is an up-and-coming young opera singer whose career is on the cusp of major international success. Then comes the life-changing phone call, so succinctly narrated that it is worth quoting in full:
"'Yes. This is Lena Molloy.'
'Sister Monica Devine speaking. Do you remember me?
Saint Joseph's Home?'
I sank on to the staircase.
My heart was thumping.
Sister Monica.
The nun who gave me Mary."
So begins Lena's quest to find Mary's birth parents in an Ireland which has changed out of all recognition since the legal, if somewhat hasty, adoption some 30 years earlier.
The familiar tale of separation and loss is given a new twist by the fact that Lena herself is adopted, and has failed to trace her own birth parents - unusually, she can see the dilemma from both sides. But McAuley has plenty of other tricks up her generous narrative sleeve. Musical leitmotifs provide a poignant soundtrack as Lena drives around Ireland chasing shadows and clutching minute snippets of information; snatches of Mozart, verses of country and western songs.
Another thematic strand features feminist quotations - not all of them coming from the mouths of feminists, or even babes.
Friendships take subtle shifts as loyalties are shaken into new configurations; and stereotypes are cleverly subverted, particularly those which have to do with anti-clerical assumptions and with the conventions of romance fiction itself.
Trapped indoors by bad weather and frustration, Lena attempts to relax by reading the book she bought at the airport: the kind, she notes wryly, that has silver writing on the front. "I put more turf on the fire, settled myself into a comfortable armchair and tried to absorb myself in the story of a fashion designer whose ideas are stolen by an employer who then tries to kill her . . . ." Not surprisingly, she doesn't get very far.
Singing Bird may have green shiny writing on its cover, but readers who settle down with it will have no such problems. It is an absorbing, entertaining and refreshingly unpatronising slice of summer reading.
• Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
