Fiction:

Poets are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan         General Fiction

Tara West 

It’s the ‘what ifs?’ that keep thirty-something Tommie Shaw awake at night. Well, mostly it’s her big gay housemate Blob, a morbidly obese actor and Morrissey impersonator, who keeps her awake as he vogues around their shabby kitchen. But the ‘what ifs?’ are definitely up there.

What if her mother’s soon-to-be-released sensational memoirs air all of Tommie’s sad and sordid laundry? What if she can’t save her beleaguered colleagues’ jobs when she’s hit with an unwelcome promotion? What if Gluteus Maximus’s wife learns of their affair? What if Blob finds out he didn’t win the role in the TV ad through talent alone but through her influence? And what if her depression comes back?

After fifteen years in a walking coma, life comes looking for Tommie Shaw – but as the pressure mounts, can her artistic soul take the heat?

Fresh, highly original and darkly funny, Poets are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan is a subtle, bittersweet account of one woman’s struggle to stop falling apart.

Tara West was born in Carrickfergus, near Belfast, in 1970. She currently lives in County Antrim and works as a copywriter for a Belfast advertising agency. Tara is married and has a four year old daughter.

Tara has received recognition from The Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s under their Artists’ Career Enhancement Scheme (ACES). ACES identifies career artists whose work is of a high quality, original, challenging and innovative, and supports them with an individual bursary of £5,000. As a recipient, Tara West will develop a significant new literary work with mentoring support from The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. The Arts Council will showcase successful applicants when the award-winners are announced in December 2011 and over the year of the award.

West’s first novel, Fodder, was published to much critical acclaim, and her second novel, Poets are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan, was completed recently with Arts Council support. Her third novel promises to carve her place among the best contemporary Northern Irish writers.

Author's Home: Country Antrim, N. Ireland.

World Rights (E book rights sold to Untreed Reads)

The Coop       Literary Thriller

Rebecca Reid

Enter The Coop, a dark and slightly mystical psychological thriller. A girl, apparently imprisoned in a room, is the thread of mystery running parallel to the tale of Thatchbury village. The 'girl in the room' is, unbeknown to the reader until the end, in fact the key to the entire story. She is the link between reality and a fourth dimensional world.

Meet Howard and Lilly. They take you on journey through Thatchbury where Matthew, the incestuous child from the coop, shoots Jodie Tiding, and so unravels the history of his loveless raising, her innocence and the discovery of her eventual suicide.

Meet Lilly, the girl in the room. Meet her doctors, standing beyond the adjoining door of her rehabilitation facility.  

The Coop is a darkly compelling vision of the layers of consciousness. Although conceived as the first novel in a trilogy, The Coop stands alone as a brilliant individual work of fiction. This is Rebecca Reid’s first novel.

Author's Home: Bangor, N. Ireland                      World Rights

Rudi                                General Fiction

Danny Morrison

Late one wintry afternoon, in the mid-1960s, a man, over the bloom of youth, comes down a steep country road in a wooded area some miles from the city of Cork. His name is Rudi, he is from the north of Ireland, has no fixed address, and though not from an Irish nationalist background, he is, in fact, a sort of rebel, having left home and community just after the end of WWII, taken to the road, and eschewed the norms of society, after a bruising passionate love affair which sent him off the rails.

He is still trying to find his way, find peace of heart and find peace of mind.

A car pulls up and the driver offers him a lift. Rudi is befriended by the driver and his wife, Matt and Flo, and is particularly taken by their little “princess” of a daughter, Rebecca, who represents some communion with the past. Over subsequent years a powerful friendship is established from which Rudi derives vital succour and, sometimes, the dangerous lure of settling down.

But Rudi has judged that he is not deserving of peace of heart and peace of mind and struggles to negotiate his way through people and society, a passage to the eventual resolution of the meaning of his life.

Danny Morrison’s fourth novel is a modern treatment of Hermann Hesse’s 1915 book, Knulp, which is about a vagrant who has many friends in many towns who admire his freedom and innocence – though his way of
coping with life has its complications.

Knulp is fortyish and dying of consumption, but something draws him back to his old village, just as old Rudi is drawn back to Drumbridge and the memories of his youth. But when he gets there, nothing is the same. In his
youth, Rudi failed a promising scholarly career because of his obsessive love for Isabel, a love that changed and determined the course of his life.

To those he meets, the great, abiding thing about Rudi is his qualities of independence, pluck, inoffensiveness and generosity. But in old age his commitment is fading and in doubt, and he is paying the price of his passion in youth.

Borrowing from Hesse’s lyrical poems on the theme of homesickness, Morrison explores the meaning of anchorage, existence, life and death, the justice of one man’s life and the decisions he made.

Danny Morrison has written four novels and three books of non-fiction, has edited and contributed to numerous books and periodicals and has written a successful stage play.In the 1980s he was the national director of publicity for Sinn Féin, and during the prison hunger strikes of 1981was the spokesperson for Bobby Sands. Morrison’s description of the IRA’s military and political strategy – as the waging of revolution “with an armalite in one hand and a ballot box in the other” became the foremost quote of the last three decades of conflict in Ireland, and presaged his support for a peaceful and democratic resolution of violence as epitomised in the Good Friday Agreement. In the 1990s he served an eight-year sentence, having been framed by a British intelligence agent, a conviction that was later overturned by the High Court. In prison he wrote several books and short stories. He now writes full-time and is chairperson of Féile an Phobail (literally, “festival of the people”) in West Belfast.

Author’s Home: Belfast                       World Rights

Border Angels    Crime Fiction     

Anthony Quinn

Border Angels is a story of love and revenge in which a police detective, a prostitute and a hit man, hooked together in a life-or-death chase, fall deep into border country and a nightmare domain of criminals and terrorists. Set in contemporary Ireland amidst the financial crisis and dealing with the topical issue of human trafficking, Border Angels is a compelling new novel by a talented N. Irish writer.

Inspector Celcius Daly, a downbeat insomniac with a troubled personal life, hunts for a trafficked woman, Lena Novak, who mysteriously disappears one winter’s night along the Irish border, leaving in her wake the corpses of two men. Daly finds himself suddenly cast adrift in a wild terrain of disappearing lanes and blown-up bridges, abandoned ghost-estates and thick forests − the ultimate refuge for people traffickers and terrorists.

His investigation uncovers the fraudulent business activities of Jack Fowler, a former IRA man turned property tycoon, who has been bankrupted by the collapse of the Irish housing market. A client of Lena Novak’s, Fowler makes the fatal mistake of trying to rescue her from a border brothel. This single selfless act, the first in his entire life, leads to the unravelling of his personal and business affairs. After he is discovered, drowned in his swimming pool, a hit man is dispatched by the by his political masters to track down Lena and the whereabouts of several million pounds that Fowler embezzled from a community development organisation.

Border country is a brutal place, particularly if you do not belong, but Lena manages to find a hiding place in a ghost-estate. She passes unnoticed in a broken society of unsold properties, racist attacks and violent crime triggered by the recession. On her to-do list are the names of the men she has met. On the one side are the names of those who will live, on the other, those who will die. Daly, believing she is a victim of powerful criminal forces, becomes an unsuspecting pawn in her plot for revenge. He becomes emotionally entangled with her, only realising too late that he has snagged more than he expected.

Daly unravels the reasons for Lena’s disappearance and rescues her after she is kidnapped by the hit man. Duped into providing her with money and a safe refuge, he is left floundering after she blows him a kiss and disappears with her kidnapper. With Daly’s gun and the help of the hit man, she sets about ensnaring her final victim in a sinister sex game. Daly must follow her chilling trail in the hope that he does not become her final victim.

In the end, he comes to understand that without death there are no lessons in life.

Anthony Quinn is a stunning new crime fiction author. His first novel, Disappeared, will be published by Mysterious Press.com in 2012.

Author Home: Dungannon, N. Ireland          World Rights

Shell House                 Mystery

Gayle Curtis

‘My name is Rebecca Banford, only it isn’t the name I was born with. I am a child killer. That is a reference to me that is true and unchanging. I don’t even know who I am. I know that I am a part of your society and I am a product of my circumstances and surroundings, but I am socially invisible, even though I am infamous. People become lost under their labels; wife, mother, father, sister... I am entrenched under mine.’

‘I suppose I should have started by saying that as you read this I have no care whether you like me or not. I’m not telling you this story for any other reason than I want to expel it from myself. I am undecided about what I think of most of it and I have no regard for what you or anyone thinks about me either way. My name is Harry Rochester. My arrogance, when I began writing this, caused me to assume you knew who I was, seeing as you are, after all, reading it. My daughter, Gabrielle killed two children. There. I’ve said it.’

Two separate diaries of two separate lives, both having experienced years filled with guilt, loneliness and isolation.

Harry Rochester, an eighty-year-old retired Barrister, begins a diary about his life, in an attempt to make sense of his regrets and the abandonment of his daughter over forty years ago.

As their lives run in parallel, Gabrielle also begins a diary about her own life, in order to make sense of her catastrophic actions and the bridges that were broken with her family many years ago. They make contact with one another, and try to entwine their stories in order to put the past behind them.

But the unravelling of their separate lives reveals events and misunderstandings unknown to either of them. Harry and Gabrielle desperately try and make up for all the lost years, with the threat of time running out on them both.

Gayle Curtis, in a novel reminiscent of the great Thomas H. Cook, gives us two psychological portraits of a father and daughter caught up in their own guilt and emotional pain, trying to make sense of the actions and the circumstances that led to their lonely separation.

Gayle Curtis grew up in a market town in Norfolk. She still lives in the county in a beautiful village with her husband Chris and lots of cats who inspire her. This is her second novel. Her first, Memory Scents, is also available.

Author's Home: Norfolk, England              World Rights

Also by Gayle Curtis:

Memory Scents                 Mystery

Gayle Carter-Curtis

She looked even more beautiful now than she had done when she’d been alive. Her green eyes were still sparkling, but now glazed, they held a snapshot of the fear that she had endured only moments previously. Death fascinated Tim. The way a person’s eyes altered, showing no emotion, becoming empty, coloured oval shaped glass. He loved that part, when he could reflect on the stillness of his victim like a photo in an album.

Ten years after the disappearance of Alice and her mother can’t process the information that she may have been murdered by a serial killer. She finds solace in writing Alice love letters, believing that this will bring her daughter home, but years of denial, pain and isolation may have left behind an inability to accept the truth.

An unsolved series of child murders is the shocking news that hits Chrissie shortly after moving to a picturesque North Norfolk coastal village. Sinister paranormal activity in her idyllic cottage causes her to wonder if she is receiving a message from one of the victims, or if her memory is playing tricks on her and she is recalling a past life. Many eerie coincidences begin to reveal the truth.

Grace is married to a serial killer, something she has been aware of for almost a year. Her decision to keep it a secret comes from her desire for revenge, but she may have left her carefully thought out plans too late. All three women are linked in their involvement with the same nightmare, as they try to unravel the catastrophic chain of events caused by a child killer.

Memory Scents is available on Kindle:

Memory Scents e book

Author’s Home: Norfolk, England.   World Rights.

Biddy Weirdo            General Fiction

Lesley Richardson

A spare and moving account of the devastating effects of a relentless campaign of bullying on its subject, a shy young loner with an exceptional talent for drawing and an emotionally crippled father. Set in a fictional seaside town in Northern Ireland, this story with universal appeal is at once full of pathos and speckled with black humour. Reminiscent of Brian Moore's Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne in its acute portrait of the quiet desperation of the socially inept, this is a very promising first novel from a writer with much potential.

 Author's home: Bangor, N. Ireland.      World Rights

Jacques   Contemporary Fiction

Tanya Ravenswater

Jacques is a unique coming-of-age story told by a writer with a rare ability to capture her characters’ turbulent inner lives in a very immediate and arresting way. Set in contemporary England and told from the perspective of a man in his early thirties, the narrative begins at the first defining moment of Jacques Lafitte’s young life: when, at eleven years old, he loses both of his parents in close succession in tragic and untimely circumstances, and is forced to move from his native Paris to the UK, to live with his legal guardian, Oliver Clarke and his family, near Chester.

Part Dead Poets’ Society, part Austenian love story, this is a rich yet sharply focused narrative which charts the progress of what seems from the outset to be an impossible romantic relationship, and relates a young man’s struggle to forge his own values and identity in an often unsympathetic environment. A sense of alienation from his surroundings and those in it, which is common perhaps to young people everywhere, is compounded in Jacques’ case by the fact that he is ‘l’étranger’ – the eternal outsider, cut adrift from his roots and suddenly transplanted into another culture.

Materially, Jacques’ new family circumstances are comfortable and privileged, even, with Anna and Oliver Clarke clearly committed to offering him the same opportunities for a private education and a promising career of his choice as their own son and daughter, Matthew and Rebecca. In emotional and spiritual terms however, Jacques finds himself in a vacuum, which only makes him feel the loss of the warmth and unconditional love of his own parents all the more keenly.

As the ‘slow burn’ of a love affair which some might regard as taboo reaches a surprising denouement, Jacques is forced to shake off the fetters forged by the stifling and wrong-footed values of his inadequate guardian, Oliver, and finally assert himself as an adult in his own right, with his own authentic take on life and how to live it.

This is an unconventional story which celebrates the particular value of individual experience.

Tanya Ravenswater was born in Bangor, Northern Ireland in 1962 and graduated with a degree in modern languages from St Andrew's University, Scotland, in 1985.Tanya subsequently qualified as a registered nurse and worked in hospitals in Scotland and Wales for a number of years. When she took a career break to look after her two children, Tanya began to write short stories, longer pieces of fiction and more recently, poetry. Her writing style is varied and highly versatile, ranging from darkly humorous satire to more lyrical and emotionally charged work. She enjoys working with children and has completed several school and community creative writing-based projects.Tanya has had numerous short stories and poems published, and she has written another novel, Russian Dolls.

      Also by Tanya Ravenswater:   

Russian Dolls           Literary Fiction

Tanya Ravenswater

Beautifully written with a simple lyricism which is sustained apparently effortlessly throughout, this is a compelling first novel of rare integrity and compassion which breaks down the barriers between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and gives us a unique insight into the world of the obsessive-compulsive – and the power of friendship, compassion and love.

Middletown Tales       Short story collection

A collection of quirky, darkly humorous tales, all set in the fictional Northern English town of Middleton.The events and characters portrayed in individual stories intertwine to create a pleasing sense of unity of time, place and community. Gentle satire with a sometimes savage twist in the tale. World Rights.

Fire and Ice                     Contemporary Women's Fiction

Mary O'Sullivan

Jack Cantor is an only child from a middle class background. Academically brilliant, he is studying for his Leaving Certificate at just sixteen years of age and is sure to score very high points for University entrance. Jack’s intellectual ability is not matched by emotional intelligence. He has difficulty in forming friendships with his peers and is cold and withdrawn even with those closest to him. While he appears to be self-sufficient, he is hurt by the rejection of his classmates, particularly Shane Mulcahy and his gang of followers, including the very pretty Gayle Fennell. Their constant teasing causes Jack to grow increasingly angry and alienated from the normal life of a teenager.

Ruth Cantor is Quality Control Manager in Angelia Pharmaceutical plant and mother to Jack. Ever since her son was born she has been proud of his academic achievements but ignores her occasional concern about his lack of social skills. She suppresses a sense of guilt at having worked through Jack’s childhood. His day to day care was, and still is, carried out by the au pair Ingrid Vangen, who has worked with the Cantor family since Jack was a baby.

Garry Cantor, book shop owner, is father to Jack. When Ingrid discovers reading material of a very violent nature in Jack’s bedroom, she brings it straight to the boy’s father. Garry is horrified when he sees the detailed depictions of animal and human torture. He learns that Jack has also been visiting web sites dedicated to sadism. He punishes Jack by burning the literature, putting a control on his web viewing and withdrawing his credit card. Satisfied that his son is truly sorry and understands that his behaviour is unacceptable, Garry protects his wife by not telling her about her son’s predilection for violence.

When Ingrid finds knives in the garden shed after a neighbour’s cat has been disembowelled, she believes Jack responsible for the animal’s death and she fears for her own life. She decides that the time has come for her to leave the Cantors.

The chemical factory where Ruth works announces its closure. Ruth is offered a promotion and relocation to Texas. Garry is very concerned about his business, as sales have been steadily dropping in the book shop, and of the imminent factory closure which would mean even less disposable income in the town. As both his parents worry about their careers and Ingrid makes preparations to leave, Jack grows increasingly isolated. His anger reaches a peak when classmate Gayle Fennell makes an official complaint against him to the school head.

Jack discovers a flush of magic mushrooms in the woods. He sees this as a way of ingratiating himself with his peers and of impressing Gayle Fennell. But things don’t go according to plan and Jack finds himself once again on the outside looking in. Feeling isolated, rejected and very angry, Jack struggles with his violent urges. As the teasing at school becomes unbearable, he retreats into his own world of anger and revenge. Isolated, hurt, unable to communicate his inner turmoil, he finds comfort and empowerment in the set of knives he has recently bought.

Through the course of Fire and Ice, Jack abandons his hope to fit in and accepts that he never will. A tragic event reinforces his belief that his destiny is to live his life by his own rules and not those imposed by family or society. At sixteen years old, Jack Cantor plans a lifetime of paying lip service to societal norms while secretly pushing the boundaries of decency to its limits.

Fire and Ice is available as an e book:

Fire and Ice e book

World Rights

Also Available:

Inside Out; Under the Rainbow; Time and Tide

World Rights (Ireland sold).

The fourth, fifth and sixth and seventh novels by Irish author Mary O’Sullivan. Mary’s first six books are published by Poolbeg in Ireland. She is ready for the world stage. The next Maeve Binchy?

Author home's: County Cork, Ireland. 

Non-Fiction:

The Colour Red                                    Photography

Photographs by Alain le Garsmeur

When renowned photographer Alain Le Garsmeur was going through his collection while planning for the future, he began to notice the colour red as a thread that seems to wind its way, in so many guises, through much of his work. In 100 stunning photographs, taken in all corners of the globe, the colour red appears, sometimes boldly, sometimes much more subtly. Together, these 100 images, taken between 1970 and 1985, create a compelling portrait of a life lived through photography. It is a life in which the photographer’s vision strikingly captures and celebrates the serendipity by which the world presents itself to us every day.

Click here to view the book:  www.redcolour.net

Alain Le Garsmeur is an acclaimed photographer who has worked for many international publications, including the Sunday (London) Times, Observer and French Geo Magazines. He has travelled the world and photographed it for over 40 years. In 1986 he was awarded a World Press Award for his photographs of China. He moved to Northern Ireland in 1995 and has since published a number of photographic books, including Yeats: Images of Ireland, James Joyce: Reflections of Ireland, Strangford: Portrait of an Irish Lough, and his latest, Lough Erne.

Author's Home: Kearney Village, N. Ireland                 World Rights

The Man Who Dated the Earth         History/Biography/Religion

James Ussher and the battle between creationism and evolution

William Crawley

A fascinating insight into Creationism through the life, work and times of James Ussher.

James Ussher was the Irish Bishop from the seventeenth century whose book, Annals of the World, made a case for the universe being created on 22 October 4004 B.C. Hailed as one of the founding fathers of Creationism, he has inspired generations of Creationists and conservative Christians across the world with this one big idea: that the universe was created just 6,000 years ago.

The book opens with a visit to The Creation Museum, in Kentucky, which is run by the Creationist organisation Answers in Genesis We don't have to walk very far before we encounter the name of an Irish bishop from the seventeenth century: James Ussher.  Ussher is to creationists what Darwin is to evolutionists. He is the Thomas Jefferson of Creationism, a founding father who wrote the Annals of the World, considered to be a founding text of the modern Creationist movement, and (they argue) he made the case for a biblical reading of history that stands in articulate opposition to the best scientific attempts to date the world through carbon dating, the fossil record, or any other mechanistic, empirical method. Evolutionists have their Darwin, Creationists have their Ussher. Even though Ussher lived two hundred years before Darwin, Ussher’s disciples argue that his work is an extended reply to the father of evolution’s claims. Darwin may be presented as the scholar of human beginnings; in fact, they say, it is Ussher who deserves that mantle. This museum is inspired by Ussher's big idea: that the universe and all that is in it was created just six thousand years ago. 

Ussher’s dating of the age of the world is even more precise than that: his Annals of the World makes a case for the universe being created on 22 October 4004 BC. At 9.30 in the morning. That precision seems comical to many today, but in 1650, when Ussher's book was published, it was considered a breakthrough.

A quick flight away and we are in the American Museum of Natural History, where Ussher’s story gets a mention in the human origins exhibition (an accurate one that acknowledges his importance). Ussher deserves his place in the history of science, not just the history of religion. But ask most scientists who he is and they will either plead ignorance or dismiss him as an unthinking Creationist with a ridiculously precise dating of the world's origins.

This book is about an abduction: an intellectual kidnapping of a kind. Ussher has fallen into the wrong hands. He's not only in the wrong company, he's a captive in an alien land. What follows is an appeal for historical justice: to release Ussher from the grip of creationists and save him from the contempt of contemporary scientists.

William Crawley was born and raised in north Belfast. Prior to his career in the media, he worked as a university lecturer in philosophy and theology and, having been licensed, then, subsequently ordained into the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in the mid-90's, worked as assistant minister in First Presbyterian Church, New York City, and Fisherwick Presbyterian Church, Belfast, before serving as Presbyterian chaplain at the University of Ulster. He later resigned from the ordained ministry and from membership of the church before beginning his career as a journalist. William Crawley was educated at Queen's University, Belfast, where he read philosophy (B.A., M.Phil.); Princeton Theological Seminary, where he read theology (M.Div.). He earned a doctorate in philosophy (Ph.D.) from Queen's University, Belfast. He has described himself as "a lapsed Protestant”.

Today he presents BBC Radio Ulster's weekly Sunday Sequence programme and is part of the presenting team for Radio 4's Sunday. He also presents The Book Programme, a literary review programme, for Radio Ulster. Crawley's special edition of Sunday Sequence from Cape Town won the Andrew Cross Award for UK speech radio programme of the year. His other regular radio presenting roles include: Talk Back, BBC Radio Ulster's daily news and current affairs programme; Evening Extra, the station's drive-time news programme and Arts Extra, a daily arts review programme.

Author’s Home: Belfast            World Rights

There Will Never Be Another You:

A Gallery of Jazz Musicians                        Music

Tom O’Hara

Featuring artist Tom O’Hara’s evocative paintings, There Will Never Be Another You is an illustrated homage to the greatest jazz musicians past and present. Number and selection of images to be determined, and each image will be accompanied by a brief biography of the subject.