She is, she says, a great believer in the simple pleasures that life can offer. "I think we need to reclaim the ability just to be," she says with great enthusiasm. "Sometimes, it's just all about sitting there, with a cup of tea and enjoying the cup of tea."

And she has hopes that, in an Ireland less caught up with conspicuous consumption, with accumulation and with busyness, we might all re-learn the knack of just being, and of being in the present.

"Simple pleasures," she says with feeling, "are all about trying to make the best of the situation. Maybe we can reconnect with some of the things that were valuable to us."

But she is also excited about the possibilities that could emerge from our current economic chaos. "I am very interested in the sustainable economy, the new economy, in encouraging community. It is the quality of life in the end that is important."

"People are getting quite inventive," she adds. In her own experience she has come across people starting up community gardens, setting up swapping networks, trying to develop more sustainable projects. "Really, it's all grist to the mill," she says with a smile in her voice.

In her own work and life, she has demonstrated her own ability to be inventive, to re-invent herself and to take on new challenges. At different times – and in places as far apart as California, South Africa, England as well as Ireland – she has temped, worked as a personal assistant and in administration, written and researched for Fortune magazine, worked on newspapers, worked in publishing and PR and for six years, in the musical department of RTE. Now, she mixes radio broadcasts with freelance journalism, gives writing courses and is interested in things of the spirit and in healing. And of course, she is the author of four novels – Ordinary Miracles, Wise Follies, Ready or Not? and The Truth Club – all written over a twelve-year period. And it is her interest in people that drives her books.

"As a writer, I make great friends with my characters. My novels are very much character-led, " she explains. In Ready or Not, for example, there is a character Eva, whom at first I regarded as a rather nice, elderly lady but who informed me she was a very much more complex person indeed."

And true to this more complex character, Eva, as the story unfolds, departs on a major adventure. Another unexpected development came when Eva's husband Jim took to living in a garden shed. And while that at first seemed implausible, Grace felt she had no option but to go with the evolution of her characters.

She does not, she admits, have set times for her writing. "I sort of fit it in when I can." But she is assiduous in making notes. "It is the little details that make a story true – the way a button on a particular cardigan will snag on a door, for example." If you note that, or can include a similar detail which people will recognise, it lifts the story, to Grace's way of thinking.

"I always say, your books need to grow with you," she continues. "My first book, Ordinary Miracles went to a bidding war. I was so thrilled that I had written a novel, but then after signing a contract, I found I had to write another novel," she says with a laugh.

"There was a big learning curve there. But I do really think writing is a great teacher. It's the actual writing that is going to teach you."

But she adds the caution: "You have to tell your inner critic to take a break when you are doing your first draft. Otherwise you will start saying to yourself… who would want to read this? You have to say to this inner critic - could you please just come back when I am doing the editing?"

"The wonderful thing about writing is you realise you are many people," Grace goes on.

As people we have huge access to knowledge about life, she elaborates but the trick is to get it down and to make it live. "And as Evelyn Waugh says -you sometimes have to modify the truth to make it plausible."

Grace likes humour, both in life and in her writing. "I love the humour that comes out of ordinary life," she says with conviction.

But for all that she stresses that she has had to hone her craft, writing has always seemed a most natural human function to Grace. (Her first book, "a self-published affair with a print run of one" was written at the age of eleven and was rather gloriously called "Tales for Everyone", which, she jokes now, it was anything but).

And of course, writing has a long tradition in her family – going back decades to the poet Aubrey de Vere who was in the same literary circle as Tennyson, Wordsworth, Carlyle and Cardinal.

"I was brought up in a house where writing was regarded as very normal. I got a lot of encouragement. I think the fact that Mum was a writer and Dad wrote educational books was a help. The typewriter in our house was kept very busy."

Her mother, Grace explains was Joan de Vere, the last child to be reared in Curraghchase – and she wrote articles on nature for the then Cork Examiner as well as writing two books, The Abiding Enchantment of Curraghchase and In Ruin Reconciled.

Earlier this month, Grace was invited, as a guest of Limerick City Library, to present a talk about her family and on her own life as a writer to mark Library Ireland Week – and she used the occasion to quote at length from her mother's books.

"The book In Ruin Reconciled was an early memoir, about her early childhood," Grace explains. "She was only a tiny child when she went there - she was actually adopted into that family by Stephen de Vere and his wife Isabel who was the daughter of Bishop Moule of Durham"