WATCHING LOVE FLICKER INTO LIFE
Andrew Meehan is nailing his colours to the mast. He writes love stories, he says – although it took him until his third and most recent novel to recognise it.
It was only as he was working on his latest novel, Instant Fires, that realisation dawned.
“Halfway through I discovered, ‘Andrew, you write love stories. OK, it took you a while to cop on to the fact it’s what you do’.” Looking back, he understands that all three of his novels are love stories.
“You write what you want to read,” concludes Andrew, formerly head of development with the Irish Film Board.
“We all get put in boxes and some of us invite ourselves into certain boxes and I’m now embracing the fact that I’m a writer of love stories,” he tells Martina Devlin in the latest City of Books podcast.
“I would be happy to have Instant Fires described as a romcom,” he says, while describing it as “a reasonably slow and gentle and thoughtful romcom” and “almost like a European art house movie”.
The novel is about two strangers who meet over the course of a week in Heidelberg, Germany, and feel an instant attraction – despite the woman, Ute, being convinced love is not for her. Their courtship is “diffident, gentle, awkward” and is characterised as a prelude to love by New Island, Andrew’s publisher.
- Instant Fires by Andrew Meehan is published by New Island.