Bernie McGill

I don’t recall if I saw my first gunman in my childhood nightmares or on my childhood streets. There were plenty in both and they looked very much like each other. So begins Reggie Chamberlain-King’s introduction to The Black Dreams, a thrilling and compelling collection of specially commissioned stories that explore the emotional geography of growing up and living in Northern Ireland. The fourteen stories gathered here criss-cross coast, border and city as they map a ‘strange’ territory of in-between states and unstable realities in which understanding is unreliable. Obsessions, death and rebirth, violence, sexuality, retribution and apocalypse are all part of the rich fabric of The Black Dreams. Bringing together some of Northern Ireland’s finest writers, along with some of the best new talents, The Black Dreams celebrates and extends the rich tradition of the weird, surreal and dream-like in Northern Irish writing. It is also a powerful act of imagining and storytelling – a vibrant, vivid and exhilarating exploration of a world we cannot, or choose not, to see. Contributors: Jo Baker, Jan Carson, Reggie Chamberlain-King, Aislínn Clarke, Emma Devlin, Moyra Donaldson, Michelle Gallen, Carlo Gébler, John Patrick Higgins, Ian McDonald, Gerard McKeown, Bernie McGill, Ian Sansom, Sam Thompson

In the vein of Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, THE WATCH HOUSE by Bernie McGill is the story of the modern world arriving on Rathlin, a remote Irish island, at the very end of the nineteenth century, with dramatic consequences for a young woman named Nuala.As the twentieth century dawns on the island of Rathlin, a place ravaged by storms and haunted by past tragedies, Nuala Byrne is faced with a difficult decision. Abandoned by her family for the new world, she receives a proposal from the island's aging tailor. For the price of a roof over her head, she accepts.Meanwhile the island is alive with gossip about the strangers who have arrived from the mainland, armed with mysterious equipment which can reportedly steal a person's words and transmit them through thin air. When Nuala is sent to cook for these men - engineers, who have been sent to Rathlin by Marconi to conduct experiments in the use of wireless telegraphy - she encounters an Italian named Gabriel, who offers her the chance to equip herself with new skills and knowledge. As her friendship with Gabriel opens up horizons beyond the rocky and treacherous cliffs of her island home, Nuala begins to realise that her deal with the tailor was a bargain she should never have struck.

An unforgettable story of two women linked by their roles in a tragedy at the end of the Victorian era, THE BUTTERFLY CABINET by Bernie McGill will appeal to fans of THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX or THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER, and was singled out by Julian Fellowes as his Book of the Year in the Guardian.On a remote estate in the north of Ireland, a little girl dies, and the community is quick to condemn her mother, Harriet Ormond. Now, after seventy years, Maddie McGlade, a former nanny at the house, knows the time has come to reveal her own role in the events of that day.From Maddie's reminiscences and Harriet's long-concealed diaries emerges an unforgettable story of motherhood and betrayal, and of two women, mistress and servant, inextricably connected by an extraordinary secret.

"An emotionally bracing, refreshingly intelligent, and ultimately heartbreaking story" (Kirkus Reviews) of two women linked by a tragic, decades-old secret. When former nanny Maddie McGlade receives a letter from the last of her charges, she realizes the time has come to unburden herself of a secret she has kept for more than seventy years: the truth behind the death of Charlotte Ormond, the four-year-old daughter of the wealthy household where Maddie was employed as a young woman. Weaving together Maddie's confessional to Anna--the would-be niece of the deceased Charlotte Ormond--and the prison diaries of Charlotte's mother, Harriet, who had been held responsible for her daughter's death, a vivid tapestry of the complex Ormond family history begins to form. Maddie also details her own life, marked by poverty, fear, sacrifice, and lies--a stark contrast to the wealth Harriet describes in her diaries, though not without its own troubles. A strict mother with her own repressed desires, the community was quick to condemn Harriet when Charlotte dies, allegedly as the result of Harriet's punitive actions. Unwilling to stoop to defend herself and too absorbed in her own world, she accepts the cruel destiny that is beyond her control even as, paradoxically, it sets her free. Based on chilling events that actually took place in the north of Ireland in 1892, The Butterfly Cabinet is a sterling example of dark, emotionally complex fiction.