Career
Mark O'Sullivan is an environmental health officer and writer. He writes young-adult fiction set in the Ireland of the past and the present.
O'Sullivan's first book, Melody for Nora: One Girl's Story in the Civil War, is set in 1922 during the Irish civil conflict that followed the country's War of Independence. Fourteen-year-old Dublin girl Nora finds herself adrift when her mother dies, and her alcoholic father disperses the children, Nora, and her eight-year-old twin brothers, to relatives. The teen ends up in Tipperary with her aunt and uncle. The war comes home in this household, as Uncle Peter and his brother, Jack, take two different sides of the civil war. Bitter and resentful, Nora finds herself drawn into the hostilities between the government force whom her uncle favors and the Irregulars for whom his younger brother fights.
In Wash-Street Basin Blues, the sequel to Melody for Nora, the heroine is now an aspiring pianist who visits 1920s New York. Now Nora is a sixteen-year-old, reunited with her brothers Denis and Ritchie, whom she has not seen since the breakup of her family in Dublin. However, the reunion is not as joyful as Nora imagined. She worries about Denis's involvement with a street gang. At the same time, Nora's life enters a notorious mobster, who offers to pay her tuition to a prominent musical academy.
Silent Stones explores the more recent issue of the Irish "troubles" in a story about two teenagers forced to confront their families' pasts. Robby lives with his uncle on a farm in Cloghercee. His father, Sean, was an Irish Republican Army soldier killed in an ambush before Robby was born. When Robby's mother marries a former Irish Republican Army compatriot, the boy finds himself resentful of both the marriage and the politics involved. Meanwhile, Mayfly and her New Age parents, an upper-class Englishman called Bubbles and a California woman named Andy, have come to Cloghercee to visit the town's legendary circle of stones. They hope that the stones' power to heal will help Andy, who is suffering from cancer. The two teens meet when Mayfly uses herbal healing to save Robbie's dog, which was poisoned. While the vastly different characters at first think they have little in common, Robby and Mayfly eventually form a bond that speaks of the beginnings of love.
