About this item
Maeve Binchy's heartwarming tales of love, life, and loss made her one of America's best-loved storytellers. Her novels, which sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, captured imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic in a way that most authors only dream of. Seared with a truth and honesty that leapt from the page, her stories capture the imagination and continue to win her legions of loyal fans.In this extraordinary biography, Piers Dudgeon reveals that the inspiration for many of her stories came from Maeve's own hard-won experience growing up in Ireland. In the land of her birth and what would become the setting of her novels, Maeve suffered through a difficult adolescence and famously lost her faith before coming to terms with who she was and expressing at last the qualities that would come to define her as both a writer and a person.
About the Author
Piers Dudgeon grew up in England, in a rambling old vicarage beside a bombed-out church in rural south Devon by the sea and watched his father re-build a largely working-class community which had lost its children and its spiritual centre in the bombing. This and the beauty of the surrounding area were formative. School and university worked out this fundamental experience in utterly different contexts, in particular in music, theatre and the whole Sixties culture.
Subsequently, he trained at Drama School and worked for ten years as an editor in London, helping launch a successful paperback imprint at 25, before starting his own publishing company, Pilot Productions, producing books with authors as diverse as John Fowles, Catherine Cookson, Peter Ackroyd, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Conran, Ted Hughes and Susan Hill.
In 1993, he left London for the North York Moors, where he has written biographies of Catherine Cookson (a No. 1 best-seller) , the lateral thinker Edward de Bono, the composer Sir John Tavener, and the novelists Barbara Taylor Bradford, Josephine Cox, J M Barrie and Daphne du Maurier.
He is also known for a library of illustrated books evocative of the spirit of place, including 'Thomas Hardy's England', 'Dickens' London', 'The English Vicarage Garden', 'Village Voices', and 'The Spirit of Britain: A Guide to Literary Britain'.
Recent History
In 2008, Chatto & Windus published his biography of J.M. Barrie and the du Mauriers, 'Neverland', described by David Lodge as 'a fascinating account of the psychological web in which Barrie trapped the tragic du Maurier family', and Headline published his oral history of the East End of London, 'Our East End', the first in a series of oral histories of post-industrial communities in Britain.
In 2009, 'Our Glasgow' became a No. 4 bestseller in Scotland, Random House published the 2010 edition of his perennial 'Virgin Guide to British Universities'; and in New York in November, Pegasus-Dutton published 'Neverland', when it was nominated for the Theatre Library Association's Freedley Award. In 2010 his oral history of Liverpool was published in hardcover by Headline. In 2011 came the 2012 edition of the Virgin Guide, the US paperback edition of 'Neverland', the UK paperback edition of 'Our Liverpool' and the e-book edition of his classic 'Dickens London - An Imaginative Vision'.
This year sees publication of 'Our Kate: The Real Catherine Cookson' in hardcover and e-book editions (Pilot Productions) , e-book editions of the three oral histories (Headline) , and the launch of a new publishing venture that will bring, among much else, new translations of the hugely popular Don Camillo books by Giovanni Guareschi, unavailable for some twenty years.
