Beginner’s Pluck: 'When We Were Silent' author Fiona McPhillips

Fiona McPhillips' 'When We Were Silent' is tender, yet chilling, and ultimately devastating.

Fiona’s dad once found her, aged six, reading a book about jobbers in the stock market.

“I’d read everything else on the shelf.”

She was huge into sport, but her passion was music.

“I sang and played the piano, and then I played in bands and DJ’d. I gigged in Dublin, then Manchester.”

Fiona worked as a music journalist, then in sports journalism, and when her children were born, she wrote features.

“My niche was women’s issues, and parenting.”

In 2008, she wrote Trying to Conceive: The Irish Couple’s Guide, and then Make the Home You Love, but she yearned to write fiction.

“It was now or never,” she says. “I started my MA, part-time over two years. I got every piece I wrote published somewhere.”

After being runner up in a Crime Association Competition, several agents asked for the full manuscript.

“It didn’t exist,” she says. “I gained an Arts Council Bursary and took nine months to finish the first draft.”

Agent Rachel Neely sold the book in the UK and America within two days of submission.

Who is Fiona McPhillips?

Date/place of birth: 1969/ London, moved to Montreal as a baby, and Dublin at three.

Education: University College Dublin, Commerce; Manchester University, MA Management Science; Trinity College, Dublin, MA in Music Media and Technology; Dublin City University, MA in Creative Writing.

Home: Clontarf, Dublin.

Family: Three children: James 20, Anna, 15, Harry 14.

The day job: Full-time Writer.

In another life: “I’d be a musician.”

Favourite writers: Louise Kennedy; Sally Rooney; Naoise Dolan; Paul Murray; Kevin Power; Claire Kilroy.

Second book: “It’s almost finished.”

Top tip: “Just keep putting one word in front of another however how hard it is. The reader doesn’t know which bits were easy to write, and which were hard.”

Website: www.fionamcphillips.com

Instagram: @Fiona.mcp.

The debut

When We Were Silent

Bantum, €16.99/ Kindle, €10.02

When Lou Manson switches schools and joins the exclusive Highgrove Manor, she has an ulterior motive. She wants to expose a culture of abuse; but her friendship with Shauna Power threatens to upend her plan. Move on 30 years, and she must testify at a lawsuit — but is scared of facing her past.

The verdict: Absolutely brilliant. Tender, yet chilling, and ultimately devastating.