A Certain Kind of Light

Book excerpt: A Certain Kind of Light is the debut novel from Mary O’Meara, following the story of Eileen McCarthy whose life is changed forever by an unusual entrance from the actor, Charlie Gitane. Eileen struggles to cope and to hold herself together as life continues to throw curveballs along her path. In the end, she must surrender to an understanding that there is more to life than we can ever fully comprehend. Eileen had always searched for her ‘happy ever after’, but the end of her story is very different than what she had expected. She finds that though it does not match up to her original expectations, it does lead to peace and true happiness. A Certain Kind of Light explores the difficulty that Eileen faces in coming to terms with the spiritual awakening that meeting this man triggers and the consequences that this has for her life. A Certain Kind of Light is a book exploring the universal difficulty of comprehending that there is much more to living than we may originally perceive. It is a story about liberation and discovery, with a protagonist who learns to be who she really is in a world that demands the opposite. Shifting between the mundane and the extraordinary, Mary’s debut novel explores how an experience can illuminate the ordinary and transform it into something magical. The book has a small, but strong and memorable cast, and is filled with fascinating contrasts between the visible and the invisible, and the factual and the unknown. Mary is inspired by Neil Gaiman and Angela Carter. A Certain Kind of Light is an intriguing and ultimately uplifting book that will appeal to readers of spiritual fiction and magical realism.