Hello Citizens, Victoria here and do I have a treat for you!! In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish we will be posting ‪#‎monthlylines‬ from Pat’s latest book Irish Country Love Stories due out October 2016. And, what better way to begin then by the words of Patrick himself!

“Although its title implies that it is not a single, but rather a collection of love stories, it is not simply a romantic novel. Love according to the ancients could be expressed in three ways: eros, filia, and agape. All are here aplenty.

Certainly the ongoing stories of Barry Laverty and Sue Nolan, Fingal and Kitty O’Reilly, Jack Mills and Helen Hewitt, and the will-they-won’t-they affair between Lars O’Reilly and Myrna Ferguson, the marquis’s widowed sister, are true manifestations of eros.

But love is not always sexual. There is great filia, deep affection, between Sonny and Maggie Houston and their dog, between Fingal and Kitty O’Reilly and their home and Lord John MacNeill and Myrna for the Ballybucklebo Estate, which will face crippling taxes when his lordship dies. The love of a young woman for a father stricken by a heart attack is true filia. Nor is there any lack of agape, compassion, from the doctors for their patients and their two sick colleagues, from a young Colin Brown for a friend’s misfortune, and from the entire village and townland when it comes to rallying support for a respected member who is under threat.

And ever-present and underpinning all, is the unspoken but deeply abiding love, I believe reflecting my own, of the Ulsterfolk for their beautiful, little corner of the Emerald Isle. A place soon tragically to be riven by thirty years of internecine strife.”