Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Izzy Souti and today I'm going to be talking

to Shanaid Moriarty. Her novels have sold over 900,000 copies in Ireland and the UK, and readers

love her for stories that are humane, moving and relevant to modern women. In 2015, she won the

Irish Book Award for popular fiction for her novel The Way

We Were. And her new book, Yours, Mine, Ours, looks at what it takes to create a blended family

and it'll be published on the 7th of July. I loved the book. I've just finished it. And I really

felt like I knew all of the characters.

All of them want kind of different things.

And I loved seeing all of their journeys.

I loved seeing their individual challenges. I really felt like I understood each one.

Although Anna was the protagonist for me,

the main character who's trying to blend her family with her new partner, James,

I felt that you really represented the vulnerabilities of every character.

And the thing that came through for me the most was the compassion that you had for them all.

Is compassion an important thing to you when you're writing?

That's gorgeous. First of all, thank you for that beautiful feedback.

Compassion is huge, yeah. It's really important for me to have warmth in books because certainly when I'm reading or watching stuff, it's either has to be funny, moving or warm, or ideally all three. That's the Holy Grail. And I think, you know, yours mine are is about a blended family to people who fell in love, but they bring the baggage of children

with them. And that is a huge thing. I've got, you know, friends who are step-parents and it's not

straightforward and it's not easy. Sometimes it's hard enough to love your own children when

they're teenagers, never mind somebody else's. Then I wondered, I started thinking about, you know,

...