Felicity Hayes McCoy Books in Order

If you want the warm village novels: The Library at the Edge of the World → Summer at the Garden Café → The Mistletoe Matchmaker
If you want her memoir of home and place: The House on an Irish Hillside → Enough Is Plenty - The Year On The Dingle Peninsula
If you want family history and modern Ireland: A Woven Silence
If you want a local guide to Kerry: Dingle and Its Hinterland

Felicity Hayes McCoy was born and educated in Dublin. She studied Irish and English at UCD, and she has written about family roots in places like Enniscorthy and Galway, so questions of place, memory, and belonging were part of her world long before she published a book.

In the 1970s she moved to England to train as an actress. She went on to build a long London based career as an actor, voice artist, and scriptwriter, working across theatre, music theatre, radio, television, and digital media. That background matters, because her books have an ear for how people really talk, especially when they are worried, teasing, embarrassed, or trying not to say too much.

Books came later.

Hayes McCoy has said she began writing them in her late fifties, after years of telling stories in other forms. Her first book, The House on an Irish Hillside, grew out of her love for the Dingle Peninsula and the stone house she and her husband restored there. It is part memoir, part book of place, and part meditation on why some landscapes never quite let you go. Readers who pick it up for the renovation story often stay for the folklore, the language, and the sense of a life being slowly rearranged.

She stayed with that world in Enough Is Plenty - The Year On The Dingle Peninsula, an illustrated follow up that moves through the house, garden, kitchen, and changing Celtic year. Later, in Dingle and Its Hinterland, which she co wrote with her husband Wilf Judd, she turned that same local knowledge into a guide shaped by history, conversation, and the lives of the people who actually live there.

Then she took a sharper turn with A Woven Silence. Using the story of her relative Marion Stokes, one of the women who raised the tricolour over Enniscorthy in Easter Week 1916, she blends memoir, family history, and Irish history into a book about memory, silence, and what happens when people do not tell the whole story. It is more reflective than her fiction, but it shares the same interest in how national history settles into ordinary families.

Many readers know her best for the Finfarran Peninsula novels, which begin with The Library at the Edge of the World. The series follows librarian Hanna Casey and a wide circle of neighbours, relatives, returnees, and newcomers on Ireland's west coast. Books like Summer at the Garden Café, The Mistletoe Matchmaker, The Transatlantic Book Club, and The Heart of Summer are warm, social stories, but they are not weightless ones. Divorce, emigration, grief, money worries, loneliness, and aging parents all sit alongside the humor, gossip, tea, and second chances.

She likes ensembles.

That shows in everything she writes. Her fiction keeps circling back to libraries, kitchens, coast roads, old grudges, half buried family stories, and the odd mix of tenderness and irritation that binds communities together. Readers who enjoy her books tend to like that balance, the comfort of returning to familiar people, with enough trouble in their lives to make the return feel worth it.

Today she divides her time between inner city London and Ireland's Dingle Peninsula with Wilf Judd, an opera director and writer. That split life, city and coast, work and retreat, departure and return, runs right through her work. Whether she is writing memoir, local history, or fiction, she keeps coming back to the same human question: what does it take to feel that you belong somewhere?