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Lisa Carey

Lisa Carey was born in 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts to Irish-American parents. She grew up in Brookline and later moved with her family to Hingham, Massachusetts.

She attended Boston College and received a B.A. in English and Philosophy in 1992.

Pursuing her MFA in Writing, she took a semester off and lived in Inishbofin, Ireland for six months. There, Carey began her first novel, The Mermaids Singing. This novel was her creative thesis for her MFA and she graduated from Vermont College in 1996.

For five years, Carey divided her time between Ireland and New England, where she wrote her next two novels, In the Country of the Young and Love in the Asylum.

In 2003, she married Timothy Spalding. They moved to Portland, Maine, where she finished her fourth novel, Every Visible Thing. They live there still with their son, Liam Patrick. She returns to Ireland whenever she can.

She recently finished her fifth novel, The Stolen Child, which will be published by HarperCollins in January, 2017.


“A girl is there. Dressed in a dirty rag of a dress, turning to look at him with the large, gold eyes that have studied everything from the rafters. Her hair in the overhead light appears dark for an instant, then when she shifts, fair. She is there in vivid detail, down to a mustache of beaded water above her generous mouth. A dead girl, looking more real and more alive than anyone he has ever seen.She is not the girl—Oisin knows this with an instant, wrenching disappointment—whom he has been waiting for.”
Lisa Carey
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