Teresa explores an abandoned cottage and finds the diary.
She moves the beautiful Fuchsia to her own garden. Her son Eoin,
who has Asberger's Syndrome, fixates on it. Little by little,
the full story behind the diary comes out, and at the same time
another devastating secret appears, closer to home.
The Irish language name for fuchsia is Deora Dé,
literally Tears of God,
and the overtones of that are fitting for this tragic story,
which builds to a complete disaster for Teresa and her family on
September 11, 2001.
who left France before
the Revolution.
After O-levels and a two-year stint in the Civil Service, she
returned to education, completed A-levels and won a scholarship to
Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island where she met her Irish husband.
She majored in English and French literature, qualified as a Secondary teacher
and taught in a public school. She moved to Los Angeles for two years and then to Ireland,
where she raised three children and engaged in many voluntary activities,
among them organising a youth club and adult daytime education. Nowadays, she
enjoys her seven grandchildren,
and for recreation engages in choral singing, walking and gardening.
Over the years has published occasional short stories.
In 2003 her story Boy was shortlisted for
The Hennessy Prize. Her first novel,
Happiness is a Lost Island, set mainly in Seychelles,
appeared in 2018.
In 2015 this novel The Tears of God made the Long List in the
Irish Writers' Centre Novel Fair, and was judged publishable.
The original
working title was The Fuchsia Child, inspired by the
magnificent fuchsia in her
back garden and one of the characters, an autistic child who
obsesses about fuchsia. Like Teresa, the main character
in the novel, Lise found the fuchsia growing beside a derelict cottage in a
nearby field and transplanted it.
