Work of fiction that is true to the spirit of a real-life woman

Dermot Bolger felt strange portraying himself in his latest novel but, he tells Sue Leonard, it was a necessary bridge into his second novel about the extraordinary Sheila Fitzgerald

In Dermot Bolger’s new novel, An Ark of Light, a teenage poet visits Eva Fitzgerald, a free spirit who is living out her old age in a caravan in a field in County Mayo. Finding there a sanctuary, the poet feels he has met a soulmate.