Haunted by Mount Pleasant

STANDING up, as she’s about to leave, Louise Phillips, author of the just-named Irish Crime Novel of the Year The Doll’s House may have cried as she told me about the dark place where her novels originate.

But what happened to the family was not her parents’ fault: “We were loved,” she says.

When she was seven she was longing for her new baby sister Rose to come home from hospital: “They went on the bus and they brought a doll’s pram because they didn’t have a baby’s one. The hospital told them the baby was dead. And they got the bus home, the three of them, with an empty doll’s pram.”