An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.

The timing was fortuitous as Binchy and her husband were two months behind with the mortgage at the time. Additionally one Sunday attempting to locate where the Last Supper is supposed to have occurred Maeve Binchy climbed a mountainside to a cavern guarded by a Brooklyn-born Israeli soldier.

Maeve Binchy Snell (28 May 1940 – 30 July 2012) known as Maeve Binchy was an Irish novelist playwright short story writer columnist and speaker best known for her humorous take on small-town life in Ireland her descriptive characters her interest in human nature and her often clever surprise endings. B.