The best bestsellers are up at the front. Patricia Scanlon and Marion Keyes are having a great chat at the opening of the new Eason-Hanna's bookshop in Dawson Street. Harold Clarke, an Eason director, is delighted with the pair of them. "Without them," he jokes, "I'd be begging in the street."
Scanlon is close to finishing her latest novel, Francesca's Party, and then she's going "to flop". Keyes, who is here with her husband, Tony Baines, says she's off to Los Angeles next month to research her next book, which is about an Irish girl who leaves her husband and goes to Los Angeles. Her latest book, Sushi for Beginners, is coming out in November.
John Connolly, crime writer, is close by, hidden behind a wall of beautiful women. Ah, the price of fame. Pauline McLynn is here too. And just in off the ocean wave (well, Howth to be exact) is Eugene McEldowney, looking very much the dashing yachtsman. Colm Toibin, who performs the official opening, brings us back to his school days in Enniscorthy in 1965 and the rigid certainties of his geography teacher, Brother McInerney, who never thought that "this whole country was going to be turned upside down".
The new shop, called Eason-Hanna's Bookshop, comprises the original Hanna's, which dates back to the 1840s, and the former site of the Morrison Hotel. Gerry Hand, one of the Douglas Wallace architects involved in the redesign and refurbishment, waxes lyrical about the shop, explaining that the mezzanine where the coffee area is located "doesn't interfere with the perception of the double cube space". So check it out.