Picture a village on the West Clare coast. Two streets, one pub, a café that does the best chowder on the peninsula, and a church bell that's a minute slow because nobody has the heart to fix it. The fishing boats go out when the weather lets them. Everyone knows everyone — which is a comfort, until you have a secret.
That's Kilcarra. It doesn't exist, and readers keep writing to ask how to get there.
There's a particular kind of Irish novel readers keep asking for: warm without being soft, honest about hard things, funny in the way real kitchens are funny — and rooted so deeply in a place you can smell the seaweed off the page. That's what the You Deserve This series sets out to be: twelve standalone novels, one fictional stretch of the West Clare coast, and the women of Kilcarra and Ballinderry who hold it together.
One village, twelve front doors
Every book stands completely alone — you can start anywhere — but the village runs through all of them, and it remembers. The barmaid pulling pints in one book is the heroine of the next. The wedding at the end of Book 3 is a rumour in Book 7. The old woman everyone waves to on the sea road gets her own story — and it turns out she was watching all of you the whole time. Readers of Marian Keyes, Cathy Kelly and Donal Ryan will know the pleasure: you're not just following a character, you're moving in.
Where to start
Start at the beginning: You Deserve This Escape — Aoife had the London job, the London flat, and the London panic attacks. She books three weeks in a cottage in West Clare to fall apart quietly, and instead meets Ciarán, who wasn't part of the plan, and a village that won't let her leave the way she arrived.
Start with a secret: You Deserve This Truth — three weeks after the funeral, a widow finds her husband's second phone at the back of the wardrobe. Eight hundred and forty-seven messages. One name: S. What she does next is the first decision she has ever made entirely for herself.
Start with a storm: You Deserve This Storm — she's back after twenty years, he's still angry, and the weather has other plans: one storm, one night, one confession neither of them meant to make. Second chances with the wind turned up.
Start with the one everyone cries at: You Deserve This Light — Bridie Malone has outlived three doctors, two parish priests and every man who ever told her not to worry. She has watched the same coast for eighty-one years. Nobody thought to ask her what she saw — until now.
The place is real (nearly)
Kilcarra and Ballinderry are invented, but the coastline isn't — the cliffs, the horseshoe bay, the light at the end of the day are all West Clare, between Kilkee and Loop Head. You can stand where the books happen. It's the same coast in our signed fine art prints, and you can walk every step of it with our County Clare walking guide.
How to read them
All twelve novels are available as EPUB digital editions — they work on Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo and any e-reader — with paperbacks on Amazon. Browse the full series in All Books, pick the door you want to walk through first, and put the kettle on.