Chestnut Street / Maeve Binchy.

Patron comment on 06/10/2014

From Ireland’s most well known and loved author comes this collection of short stories under the title of Chestnut Street, a street where most of the stories are set or relate to. Maeve Binchy was a novelist, playwright for radio dramas or television, short story writer, columnist and speaker. She gave humorous portrayals of Irish small town life. She was born in 1940 and died in July 2012 at 72 years old. In 1977 she married Gordon Snell, a children’s author and producer with the BBC. In 2000 she came third for World Book Day, ahead of Jan Austen, Charles Dickens and Stephen King. Chestnut Street is a collection of 36 unpublished short stories full of kindness, warmth, love and loss and a gentle sense of humour. Often, life in these stories does not turn out as expected. They are of various length and style with a wide varied cast of characters. They were written over several decades. Maeve Binchy’s editors have gathered them together as she would have wished and they are prefaced by her husband Gordon Snell. He relates the fact that her readers often ask the Irish Tourist Board how to get to the places they read about in her books, but they are entirely fictitious, just as Chestnut Street is.