Finding Penelope

Thirty three year old romance novelist Penelope Eames moves to Spain to avoid her oppressive father and drug-addicted brother, Dermot. When she meets Ramón, a young Spanish school teacher, she is immediately attracted to him and feels the happiness that eluded her all her life may at last be hers. However, she receives a distress call from Dermot saying he is at the mercy of Charlie Eliot, a pimp and drug dealer on the Costa. Ramón, whose mother was killed by a drug addict, tells her to have nothing to do with Charlie Eliot. Penelope must decide: is she prepared to compromise herself with Charlie Eliot and jeopardise her chance of happiness with Ramón for the sake of her drug addicted brother?
‘I thought ‘Finding Penelope’ was brilliant. I loved the heroine, Penelope Eames, a modestly successful romantic writer who is a sort of everywoman of our times and a wonderful mix of insight, diffidence and foolishness. I also relished the milieu in which ‘Finding Penelope’ is set, the expatriate Anglophone world of the Spanish Mediterranean, where lonely English widows and gangsters and Irish novelists and aspiring starlets all get jumbled up together and make a fine old mess of their lives in the process. This is a really, really fine piece of sharp, precise and accurate work. A novel that will give deep, literary pleasure.’
Carlo Gébler, author
‘Lawless reinvented the millennia-worn story line to reveal not only a Dublin expat Costa del Sol akin to the RTE Love Hate series but beautiful writing.’
Caitriona Kiernan, Books Ireland
‘Penelope is an authentic voice, full of human contradiction and composed desperation.’ Hilary A White, Sunday Independent.