Magic is centre stage in Evie’s latest novel

Galway-born novelist Evie Gaughan was doing research for a book she intended writing when she came across a character by the name of Walter Evan-Wentz. She had known nothing about the American-born Celtic mythology student until then, but he intrigued her.

Born in 1878, Evan-Wentz studied Celtic folklore at Oxford and while in England, he encountered WB Yeats and others involved with the Celtic Renaissance who encouraged him to come to Ireland.

So fascinated was Evie by this man was that she moved away from her original project and instead, began to focus on him.

“Once I did, everything started feeding into it,” says Evie, who lives in Knocknacarra in the city.

The result is her new book, The Story Collector, published by UK company Urbane Publications, which also draws upon events in County Clare in the late 1990s, when the National Roads Authority changed the route of the Limerick-Gort motorway to avoid disturbing a fairy bush – that decision followed strenuous representations by folklorist Eddie Lenihan, which attracted international attention.

One of the characters in Evie’s novel, however, shows no such restraint.

The Story Collector opens in 1882, when Lord Hawley removes a sacred hawthorn tree from an ancient woodland to build a new house for himself and his new wife. He is warned by locals that his action will result in sorrow for those who live there. Ignoring their concerns, he forges ahead and builds a magnificent house, Thornwood Hall. But he soon learns that the warnings he received weren’t idle.

Some years later, in 1910, Anna, a young farm girl in Thornwood Village, volunteers to help a dashing American visitor, Harold Griffin-Krauss, translate 'fairy stories' from Irish to English. But all is not as it seems and Anna soon finds herself at the heart of a mystery that threatens the future of her community and way of life.

There’s also a contemporary angle to The Story Collector as it moves to the current day and to New York where Sarah is about to leave her husband. Their marriage has never recovered from a still-birth two years previously. Grieving and on her way to Boston, Sarah wakes up on a flight that has landed in Ireland. Intrigued and confused, she sets out to discover what or who has brought her to the Emerald Isle.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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