AUTHOR MARIAN KEYES has said “it was worth waiting” for a new adaptation of her much-loved Walsh sisters books.

In the 30 years since the first of the series was published, “books have been optioned, and then nothing has happened”, Keyes told an audience in the Irish Film Institute last night. 

“I know this sounds like just an Instagram platitude, but I really feel that it was worth waiting until now,” Keyes said. 

The new six-part series, written by Stephanie Preissner of Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope, will air on RTÉ on 28 September.

Keyes said watching the five actors playing the eponymous Walsh sisters “just felt like they had walked straight out of my head and into planet earth”.

The best-selling author also said she admired the way Preissner had weaved her books’ narratives together. The books, which each focus on one character and span the early 1990s to the present day, from London and New York to the west of Ireland, have been collapsed together into contemporary Dublin for TV.

Preissner, who also co-stars as Maggie, said: “I always knew I wanted it to be the Walsh sisters, and I wanted them to be together.”

Preissner added that she had chosen to set the whole series in Dublin to point up the Irishness of the characters. “I just feel they’re so Irish… We are a particular culture, and this is the way that we deal with things, and when we have bad things happen to us, we don’t ever sink into it. I wanted that to be really foremost.”

Still of Caroline Menton from episode one of The Walsh Sisters.

And so it is in Rathmines, rather than Manhattan, that we meet hard-drinking and hard-drug-taking Rachel in the first episode in the new series (one assumes the RTÉ budget may also have been a factor in this decision).

Rachel, on a rapid descent towards rock bottom, is played movingly by newcomer Caroline Menton. (The book was inspired by Keyes’ own experience of alcoholism and treatment at Dublin’s Rutland Centre.)

True to her word, Preissner has focused on the warmth and depth of the sisters’ relationships here, with the dark humour of the source material somewhat less to the fore, although Louisa Harland of Derry Girls, playing Anna, and Carrie Crowley, playing ‘Mammy’ Walsh, both get a chance to show off their great comic acting skills.

Cast members (from left) Máiréad Tyers, Danielle Galligan, Stephanie Preissner, Caroline Menton and Louisa Harland.

Although Watermelon, the first of the Walsh sisters books, was adapted for TV in 2003, fans have had to wait a long time for more screen versions of Keyes’ bestsellers – and now two are coming along at once.

Netflix is currently filming around Dublin for its version of Grown Ups, one of Keyes’ best books. Aisling Bea, Robert Sheehan, Sinéad Cusack and Adrian Dunbar are among the cast.