Book Title: The Ballad of Mary Kearney

Series: n/a

Author: Katherine Mezzacappa

Publication Date: 14^th January 2025

Publisher: Histria

Pages: 288

Genre: Historical Fiction

Any Triggers: Some scenes of violence, including judicial killing; rape.

Twitter Handle: @cathiedunn @MaryLSchmidt

Instagram Handle: @katmezzacappa @thecoffeepotbookclub

Hashtags: #HistoricalFiction #IrishHistory #WomensFiction #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub

Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2025/03/blog-tour-the-ballad-of-mary-kearney-by-katherine-mezzacappa.html

Book Title and Author Name:

The Ballad of Mary Kearney

by Katherine Mezzacappa

Blurb:

‘I am dead, my Mary; the man who loved you body and soul lies in some dishonorable grave.’ In County Down, Ireland, in 1767, a nobleman secretly marries his servant, in defiance of law, class, and religion. Can their love survive tumultuous times?

‘Honest and intriguing, this gripping saga will transport and inspire you, and it just might break your heart. Highly recommended.’ Historical Novel Society

‘Mezzacappa brings nuance and a great depth of historical knowledge to the cross-class romance between a servant and a nobleman.’ Publishers Weekly.

The Ballad of Mary Kearney is a compelling must-read for anyone interested in Irish history, told through the means of an enduring but ultimately tragic love.

Buy Link:

Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/3yxPpJ

When Angels Fly

How I became a historical novelist

I remember that as a small child I wanted to be a writer, though I didn’t know what kind. I put this down to the fact that I loved reading – I still do – and thought it would be a wonderful life if I could create more books myself. Not that I did anything about it – not for years. Only in the 1990s did I have a go at last, sitting in my garden shed in Edinburgh, thinking it would be a better way of making a living than what I was doing at the time. Writers love sheds: think George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas or Roald Dahl. I wasn’t intending to write a literary classic, however. I was aiming for Mills & Boon, only it turned out Mills & Boon didn’t agree.

That looked like the end of my writing ambitions and anyway, life got in the way. I had my first baby, moved house, had my second son, and then when the boys were quite small, my dear friend Anne Booth (read her, she’s great: https://anneboothauthor.com/) persuaded me to join her on a new Creative Writing Masters at Canterbury Christ Church University. I loved it, though the book I wrote on the course (a saga encompassing 1911 to the 1980s, the story of a decayed Italian noble family) is staying in the drawer. While on the course, one of my tutors made an interesting comment. He said I wrote ‘in an old-fashioned way.’ I thought, OK, historical fiction is my thing, then. As a reviewer of historical fiction (for the Historical Novel Society) a real bugbear for me is when characters in novels talk and behave like present day people, only funnily dressed. For me, the ‘voice’ of the period is so important. As research for one of my books (The Maid of Lindal Hall), set in the 1930s, I read a lot of Agatha Christie novels written in that decade, even though I wasn’t writing a crime novel, in search of the right style, vocabulary and contemporary references. In writing The Ballad of Mary Kearney, I read newspapers of the time (these can be found digitised online) court reports and indeed novels of the period.

Why historical fiction? It’s partly to do with what I read. As an introverted teenager, I devoured all of Thomas Hardy, the Brontës, Jane Austen, George Eliot. These weren’t intended as historical novels, but they were novels that had become historical, and I loved the style in which they were written. Then we moved again, this time to Italy. I was busy at work and with my growing boys, as well as getting used to a country I’d previously only visited for short periods of time. Writing slipped away. But back in Canterbury for a visit, Anne gave me a talking to in a pub (in the nicest possible way, but she was firm). I promised her I would go in for a writing competition which required the first 15,000 words of a novel. This was February and the deadline was May. By May I had 40,000 words of The Ballad of Mary Kearney and I didn’t want to stop (even though I got nowhere in the competition). That was in 2016. In September I had my first fiction published in Ireland’s Own magazine, a short story set in the country where I was born. I didn’t get an agent, much less a publisher for Mary Kearney, but I went on to write another novel, The Gypsy Bride and that one got me both. I had four books with that publisher, under the name Katie Hutton, every year from 2020 to 2023, all historicals and all set in the UK. I continued writing short stories, and to date twenty of them have been published worldwide. The Maiden of Florence was published last year (my first book writing as Katherine Mezzacappa) and I currently have a novel set in 19c. London out on submission. Through all that time I kept faith with Mary Kearney. I believed in the book, but I did keep revising it, because I could see the rookie mistakes I was making. It was worth the work and the wait, though, when Histria Books said they wanted it.

As for the little book I wrote in the shed, that’s published too. My husband found it on an old floppy disk, got it converted onto a memory stick, I had a look and thought it wasn’t too bad. It needed some updating, because it was a rare (for me) contemporary novel, so social media had to play a role – and ideas about consent needed updated. Tuscan Enchantment was published in 2019 in Canada and then republished in a revised version with Romaunce Books in the UK. I’ve followed it with two more contemporary short novels also with Italian settings. They’ve come out under the name Kate Zarrelli to distinguish them from my other books as they are a different genre. Moral of the story: if you are a writer, throw nothing away.

Author Bio:

Katherine Mezzacappa is Irish but currently lives in Carrara, between the Apuan Alps and the Tyrrhenian Sea. She wrote The Ballad of Mary Kearney (Histria) and The Maiden of Florence (Fairlight) under her own name, as well as four historical novels (2020-2023) with Zaffre, writing as Katie Hutton. She also has three contemporary novels with Romaunce Books, under the pen name Kate Zarrelli.

Katherine’s short fiction has been published in journals worldwide. She has in addition published academically in the field of 19th century ephemeral illustrated fiction, and in management theory. She has been awarded competitive residencies by the Irish Writers Centre, the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators and (to come) the Latvian Writers House.

​​Katherine also works as a manuscript assessor and as a reader and judge for an international short story competition. She has in the past been a management consultant, translator, museum curator, library assistant, lecturer in History of Art, sewing machinist and geriatric care assistant. In her spare time she volunteers with a second-hand book charity of which she is a founder member. She is a member of the Society of Authors, the Historical Novel Society, the Irish Writers Centre, the Irish Writers Union, Irish PEN / PEN na hÉireann and the Romantic Novelists Association, and reviews for the Historical Novel Review. She has a first degree in History of Art from UEA, an M.Litt. in Eng. Lit. from Durham and a Masters in Creative Writing from Canterbury Christ Church. She is represented by Annette Green Authors’ Agency.

Author Links:

Website: https://katherinemezzacappa.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katherinemezzacappafiction

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-mezzacappa-09407815/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katmezzacappa/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/katmezzacappa.bsky.social

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/katherinemezzacappa