‘Laughter and kindness were her gifts to world’

Maeve was an inspiration both personally and professionally because she was such a glorious writer who understood people — and because she wanted Irish women writers to realise they were wonderful and stick together.

As a reader, I always felt that once you read a Maeve Binchy, you ended up feeling that the world was a better place. She could see the goodness in everyone and even when she wrote about the mean people we all inevitably meet, there was hope for their redemption. To do that, to diarise human life in the way she did it, was sheer genius.

I think of how she wrote the glorious Circle of Friends and everyone who was a teenage girl, or who could remember being a teenage girl, instantly sympathised with lonely Bennie.