How much does an author’s time and place feed into their writing process? Quite a lot, it appears, in the case of Rachel Donohue’s eloquent and unsettling second novel, which she wrote in her Dublin bedroom during the first lockdown.

She describes The Beauty of Impossible Things as a summer Gothic story “with heavy heat and strangeness in the air, everyone looking to the dark skies and wondering what might be coming”.

“I think I was grappling with the notion of the unknown and what role it plays in our lives,” she says. “We can imagine the best possible outcome or we can sink into fear.”

The book — a fitting follow-up to The Temple House Vanishing — covers much ground. A coming-of-age story that explores the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship, it brims with atmospheric, eerie tension. The teenage Natasha Rothwell lives beside the sea with her mother, the striking and bohemian Elizabeth. Theirs is a complicated relationship, played out against the backdrop of a beautiful if dilapidated house on top of a cliff.

Donohue’s seaside upbringing in Dún Laoghaire can partly be found on the page.

“In my memory, the streets are always half-empty and it is just my mother and I wandering the seafront,” she says. What she describes as the “1980s mood of desertion and decay” came back to her as she was writing.

“There is something about a seaside town that embodies both freedom and vague mystery,” she says. “Perhaps it’s the flow of strangers that pass through. You have a sense of elsewhere and possibility.”

Natasha has premonitions, although what some might consider a gift is really a millstone around the 15-year-old’s neck. When she predicts tragedy and death in the near future, her small seaside community gets drawn inexorably into the ensuing drama.

‘They are lost souls’

“The notion of her having a ‘gift’ was there from early on,” Donohue says, “I knew she felt things more than other people, but as I started writing I understood it was more than that.”

She writes the mother-daughter relationship with particular élan.

“They are lost souls. I was trying to touch on the ‘fallen/eccentric woman’ in the small-town idea but also play with it,” she says. “It is the mother who is trying to break free and change her life, while Natasha wants to keep her locked away to some extent. Natasha is aware her birth interrupted her mother’s life, but she is accustomed to it just being the two of them.”

Elizabeth, an artist who can never seem to finish any of her paintings, has a “compelling melancholy”, Donohue says.

The Temple House Vanishing, a coming-of-age story published last year, was roundly hailed as a similarly atmospheric and absorbing thriller. It came three years after the Dubliner was named the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year.

“It was an honour and I think it helped me admit to myself that writing was what I really wanted to do and also that sacrifices would have to be made to achieve it,” she says. “It was both a happy moment, but daunting too.”

Her two novels will be part of a loose trilogy on the theme of the end of innocence.

“Coming of age is a punctuation moment in a life and as a result, rich with what might have been,” Donohue says.

Still, releasing a finely honed follow-up within a year of publishing a debut hints at a writer who has hit on a creative groove.

“In some ways because The Temple House Vanishing came out just before the lockdown, there was a quiet time post-publication that was ironically very freeing,” she says.

“Also, I think because I am older starting out as a writer, I am very conscious of time being short, of having to get the stories down on the page. There is an urgency inside me at times.”

As a child, Donohue did not think about becoming a writer, but was “sort of obsessed” with words.

“I loved how they sounded, the way they were spelt, how they could have different meanings,” she recalls. “My father was dyslexic and I remember I had a phase of giving him spelling lessons when he got home from work, which he patiently put up with. He had a kind of passion for the written word.

“Though reading was always this difficult and hard thing, it represented something unattainable to him. I sometimes wonder if this impacted on how I felt about words too, I saw them as hugely precious; kind of living, powerful things.”

Despite this love of words, Donohue came to writing as an adult. She graduated from University College Dublin with a degree in philosophy and politics and forged a successful career in communications and media relations.

“It took me ages to find my way to writing a story of my own,” she admits. “It was a confidence thing in some ways, and also needing to be sure I understood what I wanted to ask questions about in my writing. Having children sort of freed me. I felt there was nothing to lose by asking those questions and in telling the stories I wanted to tell. I was ready, suddenly.”

‘The Beauty of Impossible Things’ is published by Corvus Books