It’s been a beautiful summer season so far in Wexford. The brutal heat waves that seared mainland Europe and Britain were softened by the Atlantic, giving Ireland hot sunny weather. My garden is in bloom (including the weeds), and I've swum in the River Barrow at St Mullins, Co. Carlow, and in the sea at Ballinesker beach. I've never eaten so many strawberries in my entire life.

Yet I haven’t neglected my desk. My second novel The Piano Player is due for release next month, so I've been reviewing the cover design and working on an article for the Irish Daily Mail This Life column, which I hope will be published around the same time. I’m fiddling around with the plan for my third novel and have an audacious idea for my fourth.

I also took part in a couple of Wexford Literary Arts Festival events earlier this month:

I was privileged to be invited to a celebration of ten years of the Festival, in a beautiful reception room in Enniscorthy Castle. I joined a squashy-sofa discussion with a number of other successful Wexford Literary Festival authors: Carmel Harrington, Sheila Forsey, Caroline Busher, Derville Murphy, Hannah McNiven, Paul O’Reilly and Imelda Carroll. Chaired by the literary writers June Caldwell and Susan Tomaselli, we had a small audience of about 20, many of whom also had links to the festival. There was tea and delicious cake. I soon realised I was a ‘blow-in’ (a humorous Irish term for a foreigner). The other authors were all further on in their writing careers, with life-long links to Wexford. It inspired me to write about being a blow-in for my Daily Mail article, in which I also tackle the question that June Caldwell asked me over tea: what does my life as a doctor bring to my writing? That’s a tough question to answer - I hope the Daily Mail editor accepts the article.

The other Festival event was a virtual ‘Open Mic’ session organised by my local literary magazine, the Wexford Bohemian, together with The Waxed Lemon, a periodical from Waterford. During the session I joined in with an inspiring group of emerging writers as we read out our contributions to the latest editions. You can view it on YouTube (link).

This month in The HistWriter I feature two recent novels by fellow members of the Irish Historical Novel Society:

A Perfect Copy is by Derville Murphy, a Wexford writer who is also a specialist in the history of art.

Annie of Ainsworth’s Mill is by Katie Hutton and inspired by her Irish great-grandparents who worked in the linen industry. Katie, who is married to an Italian and lives in Tuscany, also writes as Katherine Mezzacappa and her Renaissance novel The Virgin of Florence is eagerly awaited this autumn.