The Fly on the Wheel

Isabel Costello - the headstrong and passionate heroine of this novel - waltzes into the small Irish town of Waterford, and is immediately thrust into a world of gossip, duty and obligation. As she tests the boundaries of social convention, the narrowness of women’s lives in middle-class society is shockingly exposed.

With a nod to the works of Tolstoy and the Brontës, The Fly on the Wheel is a poignant portrait of the moral and psychological restrictions imposed on young women at the turn of the twentieth century. Illicit love, toxic relationships and feminist desires determine the course of Isabel’s introduction to Waterford society, with dramatic and tragic consequences.

The book is a thrilling, dramatic and sensationalist page-turner, which became an instant bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic when it was originally published in 1908. It became one of Katherine Cecil Thurston’s best-known works – perhaps because of the uncanny similarities between Isabel’s demise and the author’s own untimely death just a few years later.

It was written in the author’s country cottage – Maycroft – in Ardmore near Waterford in Ireland, where Megan and the book’s illustrator Fatti Burke, were also both born and grew up. Ardmore has been home to many writers, including Molly Keane, Nora Roberts and Fergal Keane – who once described it as “heaven on earth”.

Author and Contributors

Katherine Cecil Thurston was a highly popular and successful writer of short stories, political thrillers and novels at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1904, she was propelled to literary fame and fortune with her wildly successful book John Chilcote, MP. This earned her an avid following and allowed her to experiment with more radical subject matters and characters in subsequent books, including gambling, suicide, adultery and a cross-dressing female heroine. Her characteristic tone is compelling, passionate and eloquent.

Megan Nolan was heralded as “a huge literary talent” by Karl Ove Knausgaard, and is an award-winning author whose debut novel Acts of Desperation was published in 2021 and has now sold into 13 languages. Her other writing includes essays, columns and reviews which have been published widely, including in The New York Times, The White Review, The Sunday Times, The Village Voice, The Guardian and in the literary anthology, Winter Papers.
www.megannolan.org

Fatti Burke is an illustrator from Co. Waterford, Ireland, who has worked in illustration and design since graduating in 2012 from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Her illustrative style is boldly colourful, with a focus on text, humour and simple shapes. She has illustrated children’s non-fiction titles since 2015, and her first three bestselling publications – Irelandopedia,  Historopedia and Focloiropedia – were a collaboration with her regular team-mate, her father John, a retired school principal. Burke has also created works for solo exhibitions and installations and a book series for the British Museum.
www.fattiburke.com