With the release of Journey to New Lands getting closer, I thought it was time to properly introduce the two people at the heart of the story.
Meet Patrick O’Sullivan and Aisling Gallagher: two Irish immigrants who cross an ocean in search of a new life, neither expecting that the person who will change everything might be travelling beside them.
Meet Patrick O’Sullivan
Patrick is twenty-two when Journey to New Lands begins, and by then life has already taken far more from him than anyone his age should have been asked to bear.
The Great Famine has devastated his family. By the time he leaves Ireland, Patrick is carrying grief, anger, survivor’s guilt, and a growing distance from the faith that once shaped his life. He’s learned to endure rather than hope, and he’s very good at convincing himself that he needs nothing from anyone.
His preferred method of dealing with difficult emotions is to work until exhausted and refuse to discuss anything.
Patrick is quiet and stubborn enough to turn that silence into an art form. He does not trust happiness easily, and he certainly does not trust himself with it. In his mind, surviving when so many of the people he loved did not has created a debt he can never quite repay.
He also happens to be far kinder than he’d like anyone to notice. Patrick is the sort of man who’ll insist that carrying your basket means absolutely nothing while slowing his stride so you can keep pace with him. He notices whether you’ve eaten, when you’re cold, and when you’re frightened. He’ll make something for you with his own hands and then explain it away as simple practicality.
And if you point out that any of this sounds suspiciously like affection, he will probably tell you that you talk too much.
Patrick begins the novel convinced that keeping people at a distance is the safest thing he can do. Unfortunately for him, he meets Aisling Gallagher.
Meet Aisling Gallagher
Aisling is nineteen, red-haired, green-eyed, fiercely hopeful and entirely unwilling to allow someone else to dictate the rest of her life.
She leaves Ireland for reasons that go beyond famine. After growing up beneath an abusive father and facing a future she doesn’t want, Aisling makes the extraordinary decision to leave.
Australia is frightening and the journey dangerous. She has no guarantee of what will be waiting when she reaches the other side of the world. But for the first time, the future might actually belong to her.
Aisling is warm, stubborn, deeply faithful and considerably more perceptive than Patrick finds convenient. She’s survived enough cruelty to recognise the difference between hardness and strength, and she sees very quickly that Patrick’s stoicism has gentleness beneath it.
Naturally, she decides to investigate.
Where Patrick retreats, Aisling pushes forward. Where he expects the worst, she continues looking for the possibility of something better. She teases him, challenges him, prays for him, calls him out when he is being ridiculous, and refuses to mistake his grief for the entirety of who he is.
But Aisling has wounds of her own.
Her journey isn’t simply about finding love. It’s about discovering what it means to have autonomy after spending so long being told who she should be. She has to learn that being loved does not mean being controlled, that safety does not always come with conditions, and that she is allowed to want things simply because they make her happy.
For perhaps the first time in her life, she gets to choose.
And one of those choices is Patrick.
Patrick & Aisling
These two are very much a case of she talks enough for both of them and he pretends this bothers him.
Their relationship begins aboard the ship from Ireland to Australia, where Aisling decides that the intimidating, silent man keeping to himself looks like someone worth speaking to.
Their relationship develops slowly. Attraction becomes friendship, friendship becomes trust, and trust gradually turns into love.
Patrick has spent years believing that loving someone gives the world another person it can take from him. Aisling has spent years learning that trusting someone gives them the power to hurt her.
So falling in love requires courage from both of them.
And that is probably what I love most about their relationship. Neither of them rescues the other. Aisling cannot simply love Patrick’s grief away, and Patrick cannot erase what happened to Aisling in Ireland. Instead, they become somewhere safe enough for the other person to change.
Together, they begin discovering that perhaps surviving was never supposed to be the end of their story.
A few things to expect from Patrick & Aisling…
Expect a slow-burn historical romance, plenty of yearning, a gruff hero who is considerably softer than he thinks he is, a heroine who refuses to be intimidated by him, forced proximity, teasing and banter, acts of service, faith, quiet domestic moments, and a man who repeatedly tells a woman she should go away while being visibly miserable whenever she actually does.
Journey to New Lands releases November 5th 2026, and I cannot wait for you to meet them properly.
