And I'd love if you could read a description of the night that he thought that he was getting away.įRENCH: In the rock sack was everything important I owned jeans, T-shirts, a secondhand wireless, a hundred quid and my birth cert. NEARY: Well, Frank Mackie tries to get away from this neighborhood, Faithful Place, when he's 19 years old. Tana French joins us now to discuss her new book. Rosie had decided to fly solo, so she stashed the suitcase early, for a quick getaway with less chance of being snarled by her family or by me when she went back to pick it up and drop off the note, she had to go through the back gardens, because I was watching the road” (37).įrank is quite clever-but is he clever enough? Tana French has created an exceptionally stunning story in Faithful Place to work out the answers.

One was the line I’d fed my family, a minor variation on the same old theme. The possibilities were tangled up like spaghetti, but two stuck out. I spent that night staring at the dark lump of the suitcase under the window, listening to Da snore and getting my head in order, ready for the next day. “I have a camel-type approach to sleep: I stock up when I get the chance, but I can go for a long time if something else needs doing. All you can do is try to keep up, know your weak spots and never stop expecting the sucker punch” (3-4)Ĭhapter Three. It’s more cunning than you are, it’s faster and it’s a whole lot more ruthless. No matter how good you are, this world is always going to be better at this game. The fact is you’re still just another slack-jawed mark in the audience. It’s easy to slide into believing you’re the hypnotist here, the mirage master, the smart cookie who knows what’s real and how all the tricks are done. “Here’s the real risk in Undercover, in the field and out: you create illusions for long enough, you start thinking you’re in control.

Twenty-two years later, Rosie’s suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place. He and his girl, Rosie Daly, were all set to run away to London together, get married, get good jobs, and breakaway from factory work and poverty and their old lives.’ // ‘On the winter night when they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn’t show.

‘Back in nineteen-eighty-five, Frank Mackey was nineteen, growing up poor in Dublin’s inner city and living crammed into a small flat with his family on Faithful Place. She also trained as an actor at Trinity College, Dublin, where she currently lives.

She grew up in Ireland, Italy, Malawi, and the US. Tana French is a New York Times best-selling author of two earlier “Dublin Murder Squad” series. I’m Jim McKeown, welcome to Likely Stories, a weekly review of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Faithful place dublin