Independent
British Publisher
Anglo-Irish Family Saga & Historical Women’s Fiction
The women who held everything together.
One Irish woman’s life across three decades, from 1960s Cork to 1980s London, told with warmth, honesty, and dry Irish humour.
Breda Stewart writes about ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances, and the quiet, stubborn strength it took to carry on.
Her fiction is rooted in the post-war Irish diaspora: the women who crossed the water with nothing and built lives from scratch. She is unflinching about the world they faced, a Britain where doctors were beyond question and a woman could not open a bank account in her own name. But these are not misery memoirs. They are warmed by dry Irish humour, fierce sisterhood, and the refusal to be defeated.
Breda lives in England and writes in the tradition of Maeve Binchy’s generous storytelling and Maggie O’Farrell’s emotional honesty, for readers who believe the most powerful stories are the ones that really happened, or could have.
Breda Stewart is telling one story: one Irish woman’s life, across nine novels, one free prequel, and three decades.
It begins with the Miss Driscoll trilogy, set in the 1960s, when she leaves Cork as a young woman and sails for a new life. The Mrs Pearce trilogy follows her through the harder 1970s of marriage, motherhood, widowhood, and the institutions that failed her. The Maureen Herself trilogy carries her into the 1980s, and into becoming, at last, her own person.
Three names for one woman. A maiden name, a married name, and finally her own.
The Miss Driscoll Trilogy, Book One
Coming 16 March 2027
Cork, 1963. A young woman stands at the rail of the Liverpool boat with a cardboard suitcase and not much else. Behind her is everything she has known. Ahead is a country that does not know her name.
The Sister is the first novel of the Miss Driscoll trilogy, and the beginning of one ordinary, extraordinary life.
Free Prequel
Coming Soon
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