Sara Baume is unafraid to use her own life in her writing, while insisting on its status as fiction. She does it again in her new book Seven Steeples, a gentle and thought-provoking novel spanning seven years. It’s about a couple and their two rescue dogs who drop off the radar and live a quiet life doing as little harm to the planet as possible. “Everything I write is always an extremity of my actual existence. It’s sort of like a smudged out version of us, I suppose,” says Sara, who moved to the countryside 11 years ago and currently lives with her partner in West Cork. She also works as a visual artist and describes the deep sense of satisfaction she gains from working with her hands, whether on patchwork flags or wooden birds or tiny ships. Seven Steeples by Sara Baume is published by Tramp Press https://tramppress.com/product/seven-steeples/