keg, but Meryon said there has yet to be a problem and the Israeli and Palestinian believers mingle as brothers.

Meryon was at pains to stress the potential for positive impact on the entire Holy Land represented by this particular service, which, after all, is a celebration of the Prince of Peace and his victory over death.

"Most of our more than 260,000 visitors each year are tourists from over 60 countries, but these joined-up events for local believers are perhaps the most important thing the Garden Tomb can do - providing a bridge for the two believing communities and such a strong signal for the world to bring the best possible hope for peace in the land of the Holy One," Meryon explained.

The Garden Tomb will host a seriesthe novel?

A debut author's publicist tells her, as every honest publicist should, the bald truth: that newspapers like personal stories. Ideally, confessional stories. Best of all: confessional stories that relate to the fiction she spent years making up. So she spends years using her imagination only to discover that she must dig about in her psychoanalytic compost heap, and retrieve something that reveals that, in fact, she has not made it up at all.

As Malarky is an exploration of grief and sexuality, such a confessional would require, say, the insertion of an anecdote about how I liked to spy on men having sex in bathhouses. This would tidily explain how (or why) I created a novel in which, among a myriad other things, an Irish mother re-enacts her