PATCHING TIME takes us into the heart of contemporary rural Ireland where money lending, drugs, blackmail and murder are the back drop to a story about retribution, love and forgiveness.
In the small quiet town of Killdoe, the lives of a cleaning woman, Lily Casey, and her daughter are threatened by one shop keeper’s obsession with vengeance for what she perceives as past wrongs to her family. Will Sheila O’Connell succeed in her twisted quest or can Henrietta Bontemps, an outsider bearing tragic memories from her own childhood in France during World War II, help to turn the tide of events?
The answer may lie in The Old Forge, a cottage that Henrietta is renovating and whose ghosts stir up memories of Lily’s ancestors during former Irish wars. Time, however, is neither on Henrietta nor Lily’s side, and nothing is beyond Sheila O’Connell’s contorted mind in her search for revenge.
Born in Ireland in 1964, Kathleen Curtin grew up on a small farm in County Limerick. Later she attended University College Cork, where she graduated with a Ph.D in Geography. At the age of twenty-three, having been awarded a scholarship by the National University of Ireland, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne. She has been living in Paris ever since, although she does get back very regularly to Ireland. Kathleen says; "Nothing compares to growing up on a farm deep in the Irish countryside, except maybe getting to fulfill one's dream of living and working in Paris. Nobody could ask for a more satisfying job than helping people to communicate in the English langauge, and in that rich exchange learn about life and lives. Throughout, I have been fortunate enough to be able to spend every spare moment putting pen to paper and fingertip to keyboard, making up stories. Writing is my greatest passion, and sharing that with others is the most precious gift that one could give or receive."