Each of my novels features a protagonist undertaking a difficult personal journey. On the way, each of these characters - mostly female - discovers something about herself and at the same time makes an impact on other people's lives.

Every man or woman who makes a stand helps keep the flame of freedom burning.

There was so much of beauty here: the neat, small tracks of a foraging creature, stoat or marten; the inticate tracery of a skeleton leaf, still clinging vainly to its parent tree as, little by little, time stripped it of its substance, leaving only the delicate remembrance of what it had been.

Trust is a thing you know without words.

You thought you’d never give up your vocation, a voice whispered inside me. You thought you’d never even consider it. But you’ve met the one man who could change your mind. He is your perfect complement. He is Cathal to your Clodagh; he is Bran to your Liadan. No wonder you conjured up those images. No wonder they make you weep.

As for me, I had found love, and that was a gift worth suffering for.

Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible.