Several years ago, I was in Ireland with my husband (he is Irish and we often visit his family there) and we decided to drive out to Newgrange.This is a 2,000 year old archeological site that is most famous as a place to observe the winter solstice. Unfortunately, on the way there we hit a patch of ice and had a small car accident. Newgrange was not meant to be that year.
Then a few years later we tried again. This time all the tickets were sold-out. The accessible chamber is small so tickets are limited. They do have a very nice gift-shop…
Finally, just before the pandemic began we visited Ireland again and were successful! It was not during the winter solstice, but we did get to walk inside and even without a beam of morning sunshine it was truly amazing.
We observed many triple spirals on the walls, which were later adopted by the Celtic people. Something inside me stirred, in that cool dark place, and I imagined what might still be buried in there. An idea for my book began then.
Rose Hawthorne: The Irish Wanders follows Rose, a celebrity author in her early seventies, who dislikes the limelight but does like Hermes scarfs, round violet sunglasses, and old colonial hotels. One day, she receives a letter asking her to visit Newgrange, Ireland and discover something that has been hidden there for a thousand years.
She asks her granddaughter Samantha to accompany her, but she hadn’t expected her to continually post photos of their progress on her Instagram account. An encounter with an old love and an unexpected discovery leads Rose deeper into the past, where she finds she must make a hard decision about her future.
Book Information
Release Date: March 16, 2022
Publisher: Independent
Soft Cover: ISBN: 978-1736801079; 200 pages; $10.99; Free on Kindle Unlimited
Amazon: https://amzn.to/39a7pub
Shannon O’Gorman is originally from Winnipeg, Canada and has been living in San Jose, California for the past 10 years enjoying the sunshine. She completed a BA in English at the University of Manitoba, with a specialization in Creative Writing. After university, the travel bug bit her hard and she spent the next 10 years traveling the world and supporting herself with odd jobs ( lots of fruit picking, waitressing, temp. work and ESL teaching). She spent many years in London, a few years in Israel on a moshav, and several years in Hong Kong. And then she found herself in Japan, where she married, had a daughter and ran an English school with her husband for 10 years. Throughout this time she kept diaries and wrote many short stories, some of which were published in small ex-pat magazines. Eventually, she returned to Canada and taught international students at U of Winnipeg, and newcomers to Canada at a technical college and was a teacher trainer for new ESL teachers. One day her husband said, “Guess what I got a job in California…” and not long after they packed up the car and drove south. She taught ESL again in the USA, and one day decided to walk the Camino de Santiago a 500 mile walk across France to Spain and wrote a book about it, The Camino de Santiago: One Wanderful Walk, and found her love for writing again. She also completed a book of short stories about her travels, Some Wanderful Times and started a book series featuring the character of Rose Hawthorne. The first book of the series is Seven Wanders: The Ancient Wanders. Last year she retired from teaching, and is enjoying writing every day with her dog at her feet.
Her latest book is the mystery, Rose Hawthorne: The Irish Wanders.
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