The Scarlet Feather

The Scarlet Feather is a novel by the Irish writer Maeve Binchy, published in 2000 and set in Dublin.

The catering company gives the book its engine, since both of its founders have put their savings and their reputations into it, and the first year of any small business supplies the setbacks: a bad review, a client who will not pay, a wedding where everything goes wrong and the discovery that one of the partners is treating the whole project as an amusement. The work itself is described in the detail of a real kitchen, from the tastings and the invoices to the mornings spent loading a van, and Binchy gives the business's early months the same weight she gives the family arguments. Around that she arranges a large cast, including Cathy's mother-in-law and her insistence on the difference between the two families, Tom's relationship with a woman whose plans do not include his work, and two young children, Simon and Maud, whose parents have abandoned them and who end up being raised by people who did not volunteer. Binchy's method is to give every character their own reasons, so the novel's conflicts are arguments between people who are each partly right, and it won the WH Smith Literary Award for fiction in 2001.