"Really, quite nightmarish," is how Emily Hourican recalls overcoming "second novel syndrome" for her latest book White Villa. In this podcast she talks to Róisín Ingle about the darkness of her time recovering from cancer and how she found the light again in her writing. She also talks about her upbringing as the daughter of an EU Commission employee in Brussels and how that has informed her writing, her fascination with friendship and how writing her cancer diaries in the Sunday Independent opened her up to the kindness of strangers.