Niamh Greene is an author who writes with a compassion that makes you feel she speaks to you directly. I chatted about one of her books at our local book club the other day and I was asked what makes the book readable. My answer was that I feel like her characters could be me.
Those of us starting and running our own businesses are going to love A Message To Your Heart. The running of the business is not the main subject of the novel, but the life of the business owner is. Do you feel like your family don’t take you seriously? Have you got overheads you are not sure how you are going to meet? Do you have staff and other people in your life who are just not performing as you believe they should? Then read A Message To Your Heart.
The book itself is about a literary agent, Frankie, who has set up her own agency after having worked for a larger one. She is, to put it bluntly, battling to make ends meet. She has one big client, and the person who rings her the most is the bank manager. To her family, she seems work obsessed and addicted to her phone, which her brothers call her Crackberry.
On a make or break business trip to San Francisco, Frankie loses the phone and once in America, she hires a temporary one. (There is not one business owner I know who can say they have never lost a cell phone, at least, not honestly). However she soon begins receiving strange text messages. Eventually she decides to reply to one to inform the person sending them that she now has the phone and is not the intended recipient of the messages. To her surprise, she receives a call from the person sending the messages – and things twist and turn in sometimes comic, sometimes heart rending, but always human turns of fate. Does Frankie get the client? Does she save the business? What is the reason for the text messages? You’re going to have to read the book to find the answers to these and a lot of other things! I was sad to reach the end of the book. I wanted it to go on. I felt I’d made friends with Frankie!
Follow Niamh Greene on Facebook here. If you want to read more about Niamh Greene, who she is and how she got published, then click here.
Related article: We talk to novelists Jassy McKenzie and Joanne Richards.