The Truth of Sheemore
Madeleine Widdowson
Type: Beta project
Genre: Historical fiction, literary, dual timeline
Word count: 73,000
County Leitrim, 1786. On Sheemore Hill, Robert Keon shoots George Nugent Reynolds, and hangs for it. Reynolds had threatened him, whip in hand, yet only one version of events survives. When Maud Wright uncovers the case, she finds transcripts, reports and troubling silences. When the trial unfolds one question remains: murderer, or a man condemned before he could speak?
When a battered folder of old court papers comes into Maud Wright’s hands, it carries a question her family has been turning over for nearly two and a half centuries: what really happened on the hillside? A man was convicted and executed for it, but Maud has reasons of her own for needing the truth: she knows what it is to lose someone and never be told the whole of why.
Working from the surviving trial transcripts, the newspaper reports, the ballads and the contemporary accounts, The Truth of Sheemore sets documented history beside invention. The courtroom testimony is taken word for word from the record; the silences in between are imagined.
Part family mystery, part courtroom drama, this is a novel about power, memory and the people a verdict leaves behind. The evidence has lasted; the verdict survived, the question remains.
Maddy is a retired nurse from Liverpool who has spent much of her life tracing her Irish ancestry. That search led her to Robert Keon, a forebear whose family fortunes were overturned by a killing on Sheemore Hill, in County Leitrim, in 1786.
Before writing The Truth of Sheemore she spent years among court transcripts, land records, newspapers and family papers, following not only Keon’s trial and execution but the generations who lived in its wake. She has stood on the hill itself, with her husband, where it all began. The Truth of Sheemore is her debut novel.
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