Light a Penny Candle

Light a Penny Candle is a novel by the Irish writer Maeve Binchy, published in 1982. It was her first novel, and it follows a friendship between an English girl and an Irish girl across three decades.

Elizabeth White is sent from a London under bombardment to the safety of Kilgarret, a small Irish town, where she is taken into the crowded and chaotic O'Connor household. She meets Aisling there, shares her pet kitten and is secretly taught the intricacies of Catholicism, and the two of them become the closest of friends. Aisling's boldness draws Elizabeth out of her proper shell, and Elizabeth's steady loyalty carries Aisling through a marriage to a raging alcoholic. The friendship survives Elizabeth's parents' cold marriage and the ordinary disappointments of adult life, and the novel's question is whether two people who have always assumed they could survive anything together are correct. It moves from the war years forward through several decades of Irish and English domestic life.

Binchy writes about families and small towns with a great deal of warmth and very little sentimentality, and her debut established the kind of novel she would write for the rest of her career.