Catherine Airey’s first novel, Confessions, tells a story that, especially nowadays, can seem quite familiar. A girl on the cusp of adulthood suffers a great tragedy, and escapes to greener pastures to transcend not only her surroundings, but also herself. There are inevitable growing pains, as she embarks on exciting new adventures.

However, closer inspection reveals Confessions to have a more complex narrative than might appear at first glance. Indeed, it’s easy to discern why the novel became such hot property in publishing, eventually going for a six-figure sum. Set in Ireland and the US, the story switches between post-9/11 New York and ’70s Donegal.

As the tale unfolds, we are introduced to three very different protagonists, whose lives become inextricably linked.

“Confessions essentially follows three generations of women from New York,” Airey tells me. “We meet one of the protagonists, Cora, and then the narrative goes back in time to rural Ireland in the 1970s. We uncover family secrets that led to Cora being in New York. It’s told through different perspectives, and each character has another piece of the puzzle to uncover along the way.”

Opening on September 11, the story initially focuses on the 16-year-old Cora, whose father worked in one of the Twin Towers and is presumed dead. As Airey notes, part of what she wanted to do in the book was explore the harrowing historical moment of 9/11.

“I was eight years old when 9/11 happened, and I remember it being the first big world event that really stuck in my mind,” she reflects. “My mum picked me up from school and told me something really bad happened in New York. Once we got home, I watched the whole thing happen on live TV. That evening, I became quite sick.

“My parents took me to the hospital, and in the waiting room, I saw the same TV footage being replayed over and over. I was hyperventilating a lot and the doctors misdiagnosed me with asthma. Looking back, I now believe I had a panic attack. The events of that day really struck a chord with me and I wrote about it a lot in my diary at the time.

“Because the novel jumps around a lot, I wanted to open at a point that’s a touchstone for most people – they know exactly where they are when the story begins. But I remember it being a very important moment in my life.”

Catherine Airey by Teri Pengilley.

Like any novel worth its salt, the circumstances of its creation add a layer of depth to the story. Having quit her job following a tumultuous break-up, Airey wanted fresh horizons. Travelling by ferry, she decided to relocate from London to Cork, where her grandmother once lived. For good measure, she made the entire two-week journey on her bike, sleeping on people’s couches en route.

Eventually arriving in West Cork, she secured a gig living and working with a woman in her sixties, helping her restore a 125-year-old wooden boat.

“I knew I wanted to write a novel for a long time, and just hadn’t really made any progress with it,” the author continues. “Not long after I arrived in Cork, I received an email from my very recent ex, saying that he got together with one of my best friends back in London. A classic move, if anything. But, in a way, that gave me the creative drive to write.”

Having left her entire life back home, Airey came to Ireland with all that she could manage while cycling – in other words, not much. Indeed, after deciding to write a novel, she soon realised she lacked a computer to get it down on.

“I’m not super-organised,” she smiles. “In some ways, I probably made my writing process worse, but in other ways, I made it easier. The husband of the woman I was working with gave me this very old ’90s computer, which only had a word processor on it. In the end, I found it very helpful to only have my work on the laptop and no distractions.”

Nonetheless, once Airey sat down to write, she struggled to focus on a single concept – all she really knew was that she had to write the book.

“I didn’t have this idea I was set on writing about,” she explains. “So I was free to weave in stuff that was going on around me, and let that dictate certain parts of the story. I really let myself become swept up in it. It’s probably no surprise that it was the 20th anniversary of 9/11 when I was cycling to Ireland – and it was probably on my mind a bit then. My days basically consisted of writing about 1,000 words in the morning, and then I’d go to work on the boat and have lunch with my host.

“During my time there, I found out through a bit of hearsay that the boat used to belong to a commune known as The Screamers in Donegal. I went up north to do some research on The Screamers, whom I included as one of the narrative threads. I wanted to continue to look at them from the outside, rather than going into too much detail about what was going on in the commune. I was more interested in the fact that this group was still talked about with hushed voices, and I wanted to look into how that would affect somebody growing up in a small village.”

The experience of living in Skibbereen was obviously dramatically different to London, but Airey found it very enriching.

“Living in Ireland definitely gave me a lot more space to think about writing,” she says. “When it comes to living somewhere everybody knows each other, I found that people would often stop and ask what I was doing there. By then it was autumn, and people sort of caught on that I wasn’t a mere tourist. With all of that, I had many conversations where I had to explain my presence there.

“If I mentioned my grandma, who lived in Cork, they would try to make the connection and see if they knew my family. There was this sense that everything was connected in a way that I hadn’t experienced living in England, or living in London particularly. This kind of kinship was a huge driving force in the creation of Confessions.

“As a writer, it was very rich to have this idea of interconnectedness to the fore, and it certainly informed my narrative process.”

• Confessions is out now.