“Haven’t we all, at some point thought about the road not taken?”
Being back in Pin Hill and Ballycove (the setting for your previous novel) is like seeing an old friend, but what inspired the idea of this hotel this time around?
In the early days of our romance, Mr H and I would regularly take off for Westport, a charming town just an hours’ drive away from where we live here in the west of Ireland. We would wander about, lingering near the river, window shopping and invariably, dropping into the quaint Railway Hotel.
The Railway – a landmark hotel in the town for well over a hundred years was everything I’ve tried to capture in Hope Square. The foyer was a welcoming orchestra of mismatched but deeply comfortable chairs and sofas, large marble fireplaces filled with either roaring fires in winter or huge blooms of seasonal flowers in summer. It was one of those places, where furniture polish sat easily alongside the smell of delicious food wafting from the kitchens and the staff were all local and unfailingly chatty. It was the sort of place that it was hard to drag yourself away from, admittedly, we were young(er) and in love and maybe everything had a warm glow for us!
Later, when the hotel, like so many other businesses, ran into trouble thanks to the economic turn down, the doors were closed. One day, Mr H spotted an auction taking place there. We looked at each other, with that simple understanding that we needed to go and see the place one last time. We ended up buying, (of all things!) several panels of stained glass. One of which now sits proudly in the sitting room door. We had to make the door to suit the glass – but I think it was worth it, because it always reminds me of where we started out.
The Railway Hotel features in my thoughts anytime I sit down to write about charming, family-owned, small-town hotels. Currently there are plans to make the building over into some sort of community space, which I really hope comes about – in the meantime, I’m delighted that it lives on in Hope Square!
The Sisters of Hope Square asks what it means to live the life you were meant to. What made you want to explore this theme of fate and duty?
I have spent a lot of time in my books thinking about the way people find each other. How, very often in our times of greatest need, the universe or whatever force of fate you want to call it, sends exactly the person we need our way. The possibility of friends becoming family is one that I adore – there’s a sense about it that we are never alone. It’s an idea I love sharing with readers, because I think it gives great hope.
This time however, a woman called Blythe walked into my imagination when I wasn’t fully paying attention. I’m not sure I’d have let her past the gate to begin with, because if it weren’t for my editor, she really had a lot of hard edges starting out. You didn’t work around Blythe in her first incarnation – more you avoided her like the plague, if you had any sense.
The thing I’ve found about people like Blythe is that if you give them enough time in the right environment; you can be very pleasantly surprised to find that their hearts are far bigger than you realized to begin with. And so, it was with Blythe. She is the woman she is today, a complex creature, who is all love on the inside, covered over by a hard external shell she’s had to cultivate thanks to the way the deck of cards fell for her in the past. Haven’t we all, at some point thought about the road not taken?
Writers are a case in point. Most of us have had careers before we were published, perhaps we’ve had several that we’ve walked away from and isn’t there sometimes the tendency to look back and ask – what if?
It’s the same with relationships – one word can change a life forever. And how many times have we wondered if things had been different, how would life have turned out? Would we be exactly where we are today and tantalizingly – where would we be, if not here?
Once the notion formed in my mind that this is what is driving Blythe well, there was no stopping her or the story! By the end of the novel, Blythe and Rae both find that even if the road was a twisty and at times lonely one, they both end up being where they were meant to be, but now, they are older, wiser and maybe, because of this, they value it all the more.
Did the story change as you were writing it, or did you always know where the sisters would end up?
Stories by their very nature change as soon as a character lands on a page and begins to speak! They don’t always do what you’d like them to do, just to make the writer's job easier. By the same token, sometimes the more they veer away from the original script, the stronger they become on the page and that’s all the better for the reader.
This story certainly didn’t end up where I expected it to go at the outset. Blythe remained very much in my mind's eye precisely who she’d always been, but Rae proved more difficult to pin down.
Every book that’s ever been written is altered during the writing and (if we’re lucky) the editing process. The same was true for this and where Blythe and Rae ended up on the very last page is very much a product of the journey from the initial idea right through the stages of bringing it into the book that ends up in readers' hands at the end.
Blythe and Rae have a complex and changing relationship through out the book, tell us a little about that.
I think sisters, by the very nature of a relationship between two women which literally spans a lifetime, are always going to be complex. We are, hopefully, all different people by the time we arrive at our middle and later years. We have grown, learned something of the world and ourselves and maybe, as is the case for Blythe and Rae, softened and become more tolerant.
I very much identified with the idea that you can be a short distance from someone you love and miss them dearly. This is something we all experienced during the lockdown years of COVID. I’m sure I’m not alone, during those weeks on end, when it was impossible to sit down in the same room as your sister and missing her became a physical ache.
So too it is with the sisters of Hope Square, although they are not kept apart by a lockdown rule, rather, pride, jealousy and as the book evolves, we learn a controlling husband all play their part in setting the sisters at odds with each other.
What's next?
I’m currently editing the third Pin Hill book which is due to be released in summer 2027.
It’s a story of the enduring power of childhood friendship. In this case, a tragic event leads to a breakup between four friends. But it wouldn’t be a Faith Hogan book without some hope of reconciliation. The question is – can they move past the old grievances and embrace the adults they’ve each become as they’ve grown older? Has life changed them for the better or the worse? And either way, since friendship is never perfect, can they create a new dynamic between them for the lives they live today…. Of course, you’ll have to wait until next year to see!
