‘Very often it’s poetry that opens the portal to the imagination’

Mary Costello My life in books with author Mary Costello Galway County Council’s mobile library—a huge lumbering vehicle—travelled around the county to small towns and villages and parked up outside our primary school every Wednesday afternoon. I read the usual childhood fare— The Secret Seven, Nancy Drew’s Mysteries —but the book that I remember most vividly was a biography of Dickens, read when I was about 11. I loved the man and still remember much about his life, but I could never read his novels.

.