Joy Martin is an Irish journalist and author. Born in Limerick, where she was educated at Laurel Hill Convent, her father was an English Protestant and her mother an Irish Catholic. As Ireland’s Assistant Land Commissioner, her great grandfather, John George O’Brien Kelly, a lawyer and agriculturalist, brokered the deal which gave tenants the right to purchase land over a 30-year period, turning him into a national hero. The O’Brien Kellys owned most of the land on the boundaries of Limerick and Clare and three Georgian manors, Moylish House, Clonmacken House and Fedamore House. Joy writes: ‘Living in a cottage on my grandfather’s land, I played in these houses as a child so, inevitably, tales of secret passages leading down to the river, illicit love affairs, murder, conspiracy and ghosts on the stairs found their way into my novels.’ Her first short story was published when she was still at school. She trained as a journalist on a local paper, The Limerick Weekly Echo, and subsequently worked as a reporter on The Evening Press, in Dublin, the Rand Daily Mail, in Johannesburg and for BBC Home News and World Service