WIN … !x Vanishing Villages and Vanishing Cellulite
Paula Xiberras
• TT has a free copy of The Enchanted Island to give away. Simply email, editor@oldtt.pixelkey.biz . As usual, first in, best dressed!x
The vanishing of villages might be worth scientific investigation, but in our appearance driven culture, vanishing cellulite, well, that might be considered the priority scientific discovery of modern days.
A mythical disappearing island and a new age treatment for cellulite are both explored in author Ellie O’Neill’s latest novel. I discussed these topics when I chatted to Ellie recently.
Ellie has never been to Tasmania but tells me as we chat that it is on her bucket list. Ellie is originally from Ireland but now makes Australia home, as it says on her blurb ‘initially because of love and now 2 babies later!’ After 6 years Ellie has found it an easy transition to the Aussie weather; ).
Ellie’s new novel ‘The Enchanted Island’ is written in the genre of magical realism in part informed by her interest in Sci fi. The novel is set in a modern day Ireland that includes in its geography the fantasy island of Hy Brasil. For those considering visiting Hy Brasil, well, it doesn’t really exist except as far as we know possibly in the very distant past and in mythology. The island was a fixture on ‘ancient maps’ up to the 1800’s and is located on the west coast of Ireland. A mythology grew around it as the home of a superior group of people like those that lived 6000 years ago on Atlantis. The belief was that Hy Brasil could only be viewed every 7 years and was encased in haze the rest of the time.
In Ellie’s novel ‘The Enchanted Island’, Hy Brasil does exist as part of Ireland with a population says Ellie ‘just outside the radar’ of the mainland of Ireland, something similar to the very real Aran island. Ellie says her novel bends reality like one of her favourite authors, Stephen King does in his books.
Ellie’s heroine as we meet in the early part of the novel is a little self-centred until she learns to adapt to the more relaxed style of life when she is sent to Hy Brasil by her boss to obtain a signature of one of the residents to allow a bridge to be built between the island and the mainland.
As well as becoming a little less focused on herself in general along the way she does however discover a cellulite banishing product and believes quite unselfishly that she must explore this cure for womankind.
Experimenting on herself she tells us that ‘the after photo was such a thing of beauty that even Michelangelo would want to travel in a time machine to capture it for some ceiling art’.
‘The Enchanted Island’ by Ellie O’Neill is out now published by Simon and Schuster.