A Donegal writer is releasing a gripping dual-narrative thriller, split between the Irish Troubles in the 1980s and the present day, that we are publishing.
J.J Green, who lives in Derry, is releasing ‘The Last Good Summer’, inspired on her experiences as an environmental policy advisor and an industrial-scale illegal dumping scandal that occurred in County Derry, causing enormous environmental damage.
She’s had a passion for writing fiction from childhood and has honed her creative writing skills throughout her adult life. As a social and environmental activist, she also writes non-fiction for ZNetwork in the form of political essays that mainly focus on economic and environmental injustice. The Last Good Summer is her debut novel.
J. J. Green says, “I was inspired to write the novel after hearing about industrial-scale corruption in County Derry that resulted in one of the biggest illegal landfills in Europe.
“I was working as an environmental policy adviser in Stormont around the time this hugely controversial story hit the news. I wanted to wrap it inside a tale of fiction as a way of highlighting the enormous environmental costs.”
A dual narrative, where events from the past and present unfold in parallel, J. J. Green uses her knowledge and memories of Donegal from where she originally hails as the backdrop to the present-day storyline occurring.
In the summer of 1986, Belle McGee is thirteen. The arrival of Fionn Power at her family home sets in motion a tragic chain of events.
Now a forty-something investigative journalist living in Dublin, Belle returns home one night to find Fionn standing in the hallway before inexplicably vanishing. Unsettled, Belle immediately phones her sister, who tells her that Fionn was found dead that very morning.
In her journey to find answers, Belle exposes corruption and scandal and is forced to stop running from the shameful truth of 1986.
