The Library at the Edge of the World by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

Cassie continues to find her place in the fourth novel, The Transatlantic Book Club.

The Finfarran Peninsula once again provides a cozy setting full of the diverse cast of characters readers have met and fallen for in previous books. Like others in previous books, Cassie contemplates the meaning of home and the importance of finding one’s place. Cassie Fitzgerald, Pat’s Toronto-born-and-raised granddaughter, shakes things up in sleepy Lissbeg when she decides to come for an extended visit that marks her first time in Ireland. The third novel, The Mistletoe Matchmaker, shifts the reader’s focus from the Casey clan, to that of the Fitzgeralds, of whom Pat (Mary Casey’s best friend) is the seemingly timid matriarch.

As with Library at the Edge of the World, this novel emphasizes the healing power of books and community, and of course, libraries where the two meet. The second novel, Summer at the Garden Café, focuses on four generations of women in Hanna Casey’s family and is as much the story of her great aunt, her mother, Mary, and her daughter, Jazz, as it is her own. Luckily, readers have the opportunity to spend much more time with these characters as Hayes-McCoy has written five books in the series to date. The Library at the Edge of the World dives into serious themes from marital infidelity to grief, widowhood to aging parents, but it does so in life-affirming, entirely PG terms which leave the reader loving the many characters who make up life on the Finfarran Peninsula. Hanna, the local librarian, must make her own way while picking up the pieces of her life in the aftermath of a failed marriage and her daughter’s coming-of-age to travel the world.

The Library at the Edge of the World introduces readers to middle-aged Hanna Casey who finds herself living at home with her challenging and brutally honest mother on the fictional Western Irish Finfarran Peninsula. It was this newest book that introduced me to the series, but I decided to read them all in publication order before weighing in on the most recent. The US and Canadian publication of these books lags their UK releases, thus, the fifth installment in this series- The Month of Borrowed Dreams-comes out this month in North America.

Sometimes we find our way to delightful novels that transport us to fictional communities full of quirky, loveable characters Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s Library at the Edge of the World (originally published in the UK in 2016) and the four novels that continue the Finfarran Peninsula series ( Summer at the Garden Café, UK published 2017 The Mistletoe Matchmaker, 2017 The Transatlantic Book Club, 2019 and The Month of Borrowed Dreams, 2020) offer their reader precisely that.

The Library at the Edge of the World by Felicity Hayes-McCoy