Since publishing her first novel, A Place of Stones (1991), Deirdre Purcell has marshaled diverse narrative styles to produce texts centered squarely within contemporary Irish cultural debates. Known most widely first as an acclaimed journalist and then as a successful writer of best-selling romance fiction, Purcell has gained further recognition as a literary novelist and screenwriter. Her novels are distributed in Ireland, England, and the United States and have been translated into eleven different languages.

Persistent comparisons between Purcell and Maeve Binchy, perhaps the most popular writer of Irish popular fiction, have prompted Purcell to define and differentiate her own writing. In a 22 February 1995 interview with a reporter for the New Zealand newspaper The Dominion (Wellington), Purcell observed that comparisons between Binchy and herself constituted "a kind of journalistic shorthand." She argued that these comparisons stem from superficial similarities: both writers are women, both are writing about Ireland, and...