Sheila O'Flanagan Audiobooks

Secrets Between Friends: Dublin's queen of warm, clear-eyed contemporary fiction

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

16 listener ratings

Who is Sheila O'Flanagan?

Before she was a novelist, Sheila O’Flanagan was a dealer in the Irish financial markets, one of very few women on a Dublin trading floor. That grounding shows on every page. Her heroines have jobs, mortgages, pension worries and firm opinions about money, and they are rarely rescued by anybody except themselves.

Born in Dublin in 1958, she published her first novel, Dreaming of a Stranger, in 1997 and has produced a book almost every year since, alongside a long-running column for The Irish Times. Millions of copies later she is a fixture at the top of the Irish charts and a regular in the Sunday Times top ten, with titles such as The Missing Wife, Three Weddings and a Proposal and The Honeymoon Affair.

What keeps readers loyal is tone. She writes warm, sociable, thoroughly adult fiction about friendship, work and second chances, sharp enough to sidestep sentimentality and generous enough that you finish feeling better than when you began.

Sheila O'Flanagan in audiobooks

Three women who are perfectly fine on their own, until they are not: Secrets Between Friends follows Ailie, Sybil and Rua as an unlikely friendship quietly rearranges what each of them thought she wanted. The story travels from Ireland to Italy and France, which the audio uses beautifully, and at nearly thirteen hours it has genuine room to breathe.

The reading comes from Grainne Gillis, whose Irish cadence is exactly right for O’Flanagan’s dialogue. She distinguishes three women without ever tipping into caricature, and she knows precisely when to let a pause carry the meaning rather than a line of dialogue.

Listeners here have rated it highly, and it makes an easy recommendation for a long journey, a long walk, or a slow weekend at home with the kettle on. It is a fair introduction to everything she does well. Start below.