This is an off-beat, sometimes dark and sometimes witty romance/thriller set in Dublin 1992.
Drop-out Fred Hanrahan is given the task by his respectable older brother of finding out why a young woman committed suicide. When Fred meets the dead woman's friend, left-wing journalist Maggie Kennedy, the search for the truth becomes very, very complicated.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I completed this modest-length novel/novella (about 43,000 words) in 1993. Fairly typical of me, I tried a publisher or two without success and then set it aside to get absorbed in other things. By summer of that year I had started on the road towards making my first film 'The Boy from Mercury' and then years just put a bigger gap between me and Fred Hanrahan and Maggie Kennedy.
I recently found the last copy of this manuscript in storage as I was clearing away stacks of papers from my past while in the process of moving on. When I read it I thought 'this doesn't deserve to be lost'. So I have restored it by writing up (and making a few minor changes to) the document so I could put it out on Kindle where the story can live the life it never had.
Those of you who know your Irish history will know that the political drama that unfolds later in the course of this novel is not based on fact. But I hope you'll agree that the fiction is plausible and in keeping with Irish reality then and – though I certainly hope not – even now.
Martin Duffy
September 2013
Drop-out Fred Hanrahan is given the task by his respectable older brother of finding out why a young woman committed suicide. When Fred meets the dead woman's friend, left-wing journalist Maggie Kennedy, the search for the truth becomes very, very complicated.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I completed this modest-length novel/novella (about 43,000 words) in 1993. Fairly typical of me, I tried a publisher or two without success and then set it aside to get absorbed in other things. By summer of that year I had started on the road towards making my first film 'The Boy from Mercury' and then years just put a bigger gap between me and Fred Hanrahan and Maggie Kennedy.
I recently found the last copy of this manuscript in storage as I was clearing away stacks of papers from my past while in the process of moving on. When I read it I thought 'this doesn't deserve to be lost'. So I have restored it by writing up (and making a few minor changes to) the document so I could put it out on Kindle where the story can live the life it never had.
Those of you who know your Irish history will know that the political drama that unfolds later in the course of this novel is not based on fact. But I hope you'll agree that the fiction is plausible and in keeping with Irish reality then and – though I certainly hope not – even now.
Martin Duffy
September 2013
