In The Name Of My Father…Chapter Index

This index will be added to as I publish subsequent chapters.

There are two types of secrets, the ones you hold deep in your heart, the kind that have the power to tear you apart and destroy the person you once were, making it difficult to move on. Or so you feel.

Then there is the kind you can never allow to escape, often because they reveal a different you, one that others would never have imagined.

Yet there are no secrets that time doesn’t reveal. The difference is that when they do come out, what was imagined as an enormous truth has changed in significance.

Truths held tightly allow for warping and twisting, deepening and darkening, and yet, when the genie is allowed out of the bottle, it often has little or no significance. People have moved on. The world is a different recipient, and one wonders why the secret was ever trapped in the first place.

‘In The Name Of My Father’ is a narrative that has its genesis in my childhood where village gossip prevailed about situations, and tales that simply didn’t add up to me. There were rumblings about all sorts of things, priests’ housekeepers, illegitimate children, but they amounted to little more than that, idle gossip. My natural curiosity had me wanting to ask my mother about them, but she was never a gossip, so I had to make things up for myself. It’s what writers do!

Over time a story took shape, as I allowed myself to dream of characters larger than life, yet hopefully ones we can all relate to, and cheer on.

In the story there are conflicting elements of church and hierarchy, naivety and trust, manipulation and regret, simplicity and doubt, and life-changing unintended consequences, all interwoven to replicate a credible, and authentic narrative.

Of course the story is pure fiction. None of the characters in this book actually existed, but ones closely related to them in type, did.