MAEVE: MY ART ATTACK

Sunday Mirror, Oct 5, 2008 by LISA O'CONNOR

MAEVE Binchy based her latest novel on her own brush with death.

The popular novelist's latest book Heart And Soul is set in a cardiac clinic, where senior heart specialist Clara Casey has to juggle a new job with her two turbulent twenty something daughters.

But now the former journalist, 68, has revealed she chose the unusual setting after heart failure.

She told RTE's Marion Finucane: "I went to the Merriman summer school a few years ago with my husband Gordon and had a lovely time.

"But then I woke up at 2am feeling hot all over and I couldn't breathe. I called my sister, who is a doctor, and she organised an ambulance immediately.

"My lungs were drowning in fluid. I had them drained by catheter, but of course that didn't improve the cause, which was that my heart wasn't beating properly."

"I thought a heart clinic would be a good place to set a book because you see all human life in there."