Felicity Hayes-McCoy

Felicity Hayes-McCoy places rural community life and Ireland's western cultural landscape at the heart of her fiction. The Heart of Summer continues the Finfarran Peninsula sequence in its sixth installment, returning to librarian Hanna Casey and the network of families, neighbours, and newcomers around the fictional coastal town of Lissbeg. In this instalment, changes in Hanna's home life unfold alongside tensions and celebrations across the wider community. The book continues the series' interest in libraries as social spaces, showing how stories, local knowledge, and personal relationships overlap. Published by Hachette, it follows earlier Finfarran novels beginning with The Library at the Edge of the World. Hayes-McCoy has also written memoir and nonfiction about Irish identity and place, experience that informs the series' attention to language, landscape, and communal memory. Her novels offer ensemble storytelling in which domestic decisions carry consequences beyond a single household.