Current Projects: Fiction

Zebra                 Reading Group/AutoFiction/Neurodiversity

Gayle Curtis

Birdy has written a novel. A thinly veiled look back at growing up in a dysfunctional household with her parents and siblings. Birdy was a zebra amongst the hyenas. We see her world through the eyes of her younger self, and through the prism of her recent neurodivergent diagnosis and her realisation that her mother was and is a malignant narcissist.

The novel has been published, and Birdy has sent copies to them all. In Part 1, interspersed with the text of the novel are shorter chapters in which her family reacts to the novel and its revelations about those early years in “the compound”. In Part 2, the novel has ended, and we witness the fallout in a family torn apart.

With insight, humour and pathos, Gayle Curtis uses her skill at turn of phrase and character study to draw us into this unsettling portrait of a little girl trying to manoeuvre her way through the eye of the storm - her gaslighting, cruel, unforgiving mum.

Gayle Curtis is the bestselling author of three psychological thrillers, Too Close (Bonnier Zaffre, 2017, reissued by Dalzell Press in 2020, 2400 Amazon reviews), I Choose You (Thomas & Mercer, 2020, 5700 Amazon reviews) and Safe No Longer (Thomas & Mercer, 2020, 900 Amazon reviews). She lives in Norfolk, England, with her husband and their floofs. She was recently diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia.

Paris, Kentucky             Literary Fiction

Dominique Falkner

Paris, Kentucky is a fictional rendering in the first person, based on true facts (culled from a transcript of conversations between Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark going back to the 60s, letters, online materials, and hundreds of hours of the author’s conversations with Johnny Dark) of the last three years of Sam Shepard’s life until his death in 2017 on his Kentucky farm, near the town of Paris (incidentally echoing the eponymous title of the movie he wrote for Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas) after he was diagnosed with ALS—a sort of collaged portrait of a man at the end of his life examined through his various relationships with Jessica Lange, Patti Smith, Johnny Dark, his children, nurses, sisters and myriad others not unlike the many characters at loose ends inhabiting the pages of the author’s oeuvre.      

Sam Shepard is separated from Jessica Lange and living by himself on a horse farm in Kentucky. His drinking is out of control (he was recently arrested for drunk driving and soon will be again) and he suffers from acute emphysema. He also suffers from some new mysterious type of debilitating muscular issues affecting his limbs for which he's slated to undergo medical exams at the mayo Clinic in AZ where he'll soon be diagnosed with ALS, a death sentence.

The book follows his reminiscences, musings, thoughts, phone calls to friends, family, Jessica Lange, fellow actors, note taking, daily routine, movie shoot in Brooklyn, rehearsing of an old play of his with new actors, encounters with his own children, appointments with doctors in NY or Santa Fe, etc., as the disease progresses until it finally cripples him until he dies three years later.

Shepard's books all have the same form. Not really novels nor short stories, they are more like a succession of "vignettes" or episodes; some are five pages long, some are one paragraph long, and all are titled and dated and all of them are written in the first person, and Falkner does the exact same thing with Paris, Kentucky, as if Shepard himself had written it himself.

Paris, Kentucky is filled with voices distilled in (almost) daily entries which the reader perceives initially as notes in a diary, yet soon realizes that most of them are in Shepard's own head, reflections on his increasingly fragile heath and existence. The intensity of these voices is punctuated by reports written in a clinical language by a caregiver describing in her reports the patient's physical state and doings, which provides a counterpoint to Shepard's own literary writing and musings. It is also a novel about old-age and sickness. Its physical vicissitudes. Its little humiliations, which the caregiver consigns in medical terms as Shepard's inability to write, solitude and loss of autonomy mount.

Paris, Kentucky is a stunning and unique insight into the life and mind of a great American literary figure. In it, Falkner captures the core music, rhythm and heart of Shepard’s life and work.

Dominique Falkner is a French American writer and translator. He is the author (in French) of seven novels, all in print. https://www.dominiquefalkner.com. Additionally, he writes for the French magazine NOVO.

In 2021 he translated into French the correspondence of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor Sam Shepard and his best friend and long-time confident Johnny Dark. The translation was published in the spring of 2022. https://mediapop-editions.fr/catalogue/sam-shepard-johnny-dark/. Shepard & Dark, a documentary portrait was also made, mirrored through that very correspondence, and released in 2013. https://vimeo.com/61026752

While working on the translation, he befriended Johnny Dark who gave him a 512 pages transcript of original conversations going back to the 1960s (never shown to anyone) that he had recorded while on the phone or in person with his friend Sam, asking him to “do something with it.” Paris, Kentucky is the result.

World Rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Aftermath          Literary Fiction

Martin Roper

As a child, Frank Lynch survived a car bomb in Dublin which wipes out most of his family. Now, thirty years later, he is a writer and teacher living in New York.  Still marked by the past, he seeks solace in the act of writing, in brief encounters with women, and in nightly walks around the streets of Brooklyn with his beloved dog, Ruby. When, out of the blue, a former student re-enters his life, he is forced to reckon not only with the mistakes of his past but with the walls he has built around himself.  Slowly, against the backdrop of New York City in the early years of the twenty-first century, Frank learns to rise again to the joys and challenges of love.

This is a novel about the catastrophic effects of violence and the silence, fear and alienation left in its aftermath. It is an extraordinary account of one man’s grief and his quest to speak the truth when language itself seems to fail. In writing that is beautiful and perfectly cadenced, it maps in forensic detail the quotidian nature of relationships and amplifies those precise moments when a relationship fails or flourishes.

More than anything, Aftermath is a testimony to the triumph of the human spirit and the redemptive powers of love and art.

Martin Roper was born in Dublin. His first novel, Gone, was published by Henry Holt to critical acclaim in 2002, and his work, including an excerpt from Gone, has appeared in the The New Yorker.  He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States, and he earned an MFA at the University of Iowa.  He was the founder of the University of Iowa’s Irish Writing Program and its director for nineteen years.  He also taught creative writing at New York University for nearly a decade.  He lives in County Galway, Ireland, with his wife, the award-winning writer Mary Costello.

World Rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

still falls the rain     Upmarket/Literary Fiction

Eoin Lane

No one remembered their names, except Martin.

In the summer of 1996, Katja Lešnik, a young woman from Slovenia, forms an unlikely acquaintance with the reclusive, elderly man living next door to her in Galway. Martin Finnegan, eighty-four, doesn’t talk to his neighbours and they don’t talk to him. He fends for himself, collects dead wasps and moths in matchboxes, goes for walks in the park and feeds the stray cat in the garden. At first, it would appear that Katja and Martin have nothing in common, other than a keenly felt sense of otherness and quiet independence which they both possess. But as the months go by, they share a number of reflective days out in the countryside together, until by the autumn Katja finds herself wondering about Martin and the state of his mind. As their two stories interweave what emerges is the true reason behind Martin’s self-imposed isolation, and at the same time his inner longing and thwarted need for emotional closeness – the abrupt manner in which he was taken from his family three quarters of a century ago and sent away to the Christian Brothers in Carrowglass Manor School. What follows are two profoundly moving and heart-rending individual journeys of discovery, true pain and remembrance.

Eoin Lane’s compelling new novel draws us in gently at first to the private, inner worlds of Katja and Martin and quickly gathers momentum as their stories begin to unfold and Martin’s harrowing past comes vividly to life. Still Falls the Rain is both a tender portrayal of the enduring human bonds of affection between two single-minded strangers, and an essential and haunting account of the events that took place during Martin’s schooldays in the early years of the Irish Free State.

Peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters and set against a backdrop of the wild, mountainous landscape of Connemara and the small fields and narrow country lanes of Roscommon, this is the story of their shared summer together, and the story of what happened to the boys that Martin told Katja about. The boys that he went to school with at the Christian Brothers School at Carrowglass Manor. The boys whose names only he would remember.

Eoin Lane is a writer and landscape oil painter. His first novel, Beyond the Horizon, was published in the US 2020 by Blackstone Publishing. He was a winner at the Green Bean Novel Fair in 2016 and a contributor to the short story anthology The Broken Spiral the same year. He has been both a prize winner and shortlisted in the RTE Frances Mac Manus Short Story Awards. Previously he has worked in knitwear design, historic horticulture and had his own restaurant. He grew up in Dublin and worked for many years in America and London. He currently lives in County Down, Northern Ireland.   

World Rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Proconnesus     Science Fiction

Fergal O’Donnell

In the near future, an enigmatic organization, Proconnesus, markets and sells one product: immortality. Freezing human brains, extracting the contents, and uploading the data into a giant supercomputer, Proconnesus reproduces each mind into a virtual reality world governed by a sentient Artificial Intelligence.

When a cataclysmic cosmic event destroys the Earth and every other trace of mankind, the individuals saved within this environment become the last living souls. Existing only as bits and bytes, imprisoned within a fantastically complex computer system, they inhabit a world where everything is possible. With a lifetime of memories at their fingertips, and with access to the entire dataset of human history, they create thrillingly immersive worlds for their own pleasure and experience. And as they cross virtual continents and centuries, we learn the lofty heights and low depths that people will explore when the only restriction is their own imagination.

Eventually, when the omniscient AI attacks the human residents, culling them for its own perverse reasons, the last survivor devises a unique defense mechanism. Linking his own memories with his partner’s, he “becomes” her persona within the system. Combining the best of their talents, he overcomes the threat and, finally, resurrects his one true love.

Ultimately, we discover the entire system is contained aboard a small space pod on an interstellar voyage. This is mankind’s last ark, sent as a cry for help to the stars during the Earth’s final moments. As it shoots through the cold infinity of the physical universe, the last two inhabitants inherit a fresh clean virtual universe, a blank canvas on which to create a new world of their own design. 

Proconnesus is both a sci-fi thriller and a love story set on a huge stage in space and time.

Fergal O’Donnell is a unique individual with a remarkable life experience. Graduating from University College Dublin with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, he spent twenty years as a senior executive at several major technology companies. A voracious reader of fiction and non-fiction, Fergal has a diverse scientific knowledge and a love of travel and adventure. Although Irish by birth, Fergal has also lived in London, New York and Dallas. Currently, he enjoys his single malt Scotch while wearing his cowboy boots in west Texas, USA. Fergal has written many short stories and articles, and he recently completed his first novel, Proconnesus, which was a winner of the Irish Writers Centre’s debut novel contest. 

World Rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Translation Rights

Micheala           Upmarket/Literary Fiction

Frank Kirby

Michaela is a debut novel of realistic literary fiction. In the spirit of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn and the works of Alice McDermott (Charming Billy, At Weddings and Wakes, The Ninth Hour), the tenets of conservative Catholicism weigh upon and inform the characters’ worldviews. And like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, the work illuminates the complexity and frustration of marital and familial relationships.

In 1953, when her four-year-old daughter Michaela suddenly dies of bulbar poliomyelitis, Margaret Murphy, a free-spirited and adventurous mother, compulsively tries to control the family’s grief. In doing so, she effectively buries the loss within the hearts and souls of her children.

The eldest, Joseph, struggles to find intimacy in his life; he chooses the priesthood and hides his grief within the mythos of Catholicism and romantic poetry. Jane sets out for the convent at seventeen years of age, then succumbs to depression and anxiety. When she leaves the sister house, she meets her future husband in a hospital’s psychiatric ward. Peggy, the youngest sibling (an infant when Michaela dies), cannot find her place among her friends, within her own family, or ultimately in her marriage. Swept up in the counterculture of the early 1970s, she later chooses the safety and privilege of suburbia, observing her older siblings’ struggles as she attempts to understand the effect of Michaela’s death on her own life.

Along the way, we travel across seven decades and countless vibrant settings: Margaret’s early life on the streets of long-ago New York City; the Murphy family’s relocation to the hills of post-war San Francisco and their outings along the rugged Pacific coast; Peggy’s adventures in the Castro and Haight Ashbury and the islands of the Puget Sound amidst the hangers-on to the Flower Power movement, and her affluent household on the Jersey Shore; Joseph’s travels in the rainswept landscape of Ireland’s west coast; and Jane’s life in the middle-class blocks of Queens and New Jersey.

Through character studies of these siblings amidst the turbulent decades of the latter half of the twentieth century, Kirby weaves a compelling and beautifully articulated portrait of what it was like to grow up Irish Catholic in the latter half of the 20th century in America, and how the death of Michaela shapes their lives throughout the years.

Frank Kirby has a BA in creative writing and literature from SUNY Purchase and Master’s degrees in international finance (CUNY) and education (Fairfield University). Having had successful careers in finance as a CFO and education as a high school English language arts teacher in the Fairfield Public School District, he has also been a lifelong writer of fiction. He lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut. 

US and Canadian rights to Tivoli Books

All other rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Familiar    Literary Fiction

Bethany Joy Dawson

Familiar tells the story of three generations of women who are faced with a choice: take responsibility for their lives, or allow history to repeat itself.

Annie is dead. In the months before her passing, she senses that her time in Hill House, County Down, is coming to an end. The family is watchful, her balance isn’t what it used to be, and she is seeing things. Spectres of the past bring both solace and conviction; there is one last thing she can do to put things right. Sophie is Annie’s estranged granddaughter and the sole beneficiary of her estate. She arrives at the family home directionless and overwhelmed, and finds consolation in unlikely places. Joyce, Sophie’s aunt, was disinherited. Her niece’s arrival, and the disruption that ensues, become the catalyst for her liberation. 

Across the lives of these women falls the shadow of a magpie, making mischief, missing nothing. One story gives rise to another, until the women learn that uncovering the truth will allow them to begin again. 

The novel would sit well alongside Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island, or Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren.

Bethany Joy Dawson is the author of My Father’s House (Liberties Press, 2013). She holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin and lives in the wilds of Sligo with her family. She spent the past decade home educating her three children, so writing was consigned to the margins. She now has the opportunity to write full time and has another novel in progress.

World English Rights ex US and Canada to Constellations Press 

All other rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Sweetwater         Adventure Thriller   

Jason Heaton

With an American presidential election looming, a decades-old plane crash is thrust back into the news. Old secrets threaten to expose dangerous truths and underwater archaeologist, Julian “Tusker” Tusk, finds himself at the center of a mystery, one with the highest of stakes.

Sweetwater is a thriller in the classic tradition of Fleming, Maclean, and Cussler, with an eye for detail, cunning villains, and narrow escapes. It dives in and takes readers straight to the crushing depths. The story bristles with intrigue as it moves from the 1970s to the present, and from the warm waters of the Caribbean to the chilly depths of the greatest of lakes. Try not to hold your breath.

Jason Heaton has a decade-long history of adventure, travel, wristwatch, and gear writing, and his work has appeared in Outside magazine, Gear Patrol, Men’s Journal, Wired, Australian Geographic, and Hodinkee. The New York Times once called him, “a test pilot for the world’s most illustrious undersea timepieces.” A certified technical diver, Heaton has been underwater all over the world, from the Galapagos to New Zealand to the Caribbean, and since 2015 has been a member of the prestigious Explorers Club.

His first Tusker novel, Depth Charge, was self-published in 2021, has an average Amazon rating of 4.5, nearly 400 reviews, and sold over 6000 copies, including a special sale of 1000 copies and 1600 signed copies via a dedicated web site. Sweetwater works as a standalone, and will also appeal to fans of Depth Charge. He lives with his wife, Gishani, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

World English Rights: Swimpruf

Translation Rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Murder, Memoir, Murder                                   Crime Fiction     

A story of two murders, revenge and the dark secrets of neighbouring families              

Anthony Quinn       

Murder Memoir Murder is simultaneously a memoir and a crime fiction story involving a hunt for a missing IRA killer, set in the landscape of a rural parish in South Tyrone, Ireland. At its core, it is a memoir, as the title suggests, but it is also a meditation on truth and storytelling. The novel investigates two true unsolved murders in the author’s parish - one that took place in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, the other in 1983 at the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles – and the web of connections hidden in a tightly-knit community.  At the heart of this true story with fictionalised elements is a searing and honest portrait of home and how the author’s family organised itself after the Troubles.

Anthony Quinn is the author of six novels in the Celcius Daly crime series (Head of Zeus), the first novel  in the Carla Herron series (also Head of Zeus) and two historical crime novels (No Exit Press), as well as the stand alone new novel, Turncoat, due from No Exit Press in Autumn 2020.

Published by Dalzell Press in Autumn 2022

Translation Rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Did She See You?                  Thriller                                        

Jason Johnson

A powerful and haunting new novel from the Northern Irish writer, which examines how we view ourselves and the world around us, social media and mental illness.

Published by Dalzell Press in September 2022

Jason Johnson is the co-author of Slave (Ebury Press, 2018) He is also the author of four novels: Aloysius Tempo (Liberties Press, 2015), Sinker (Liberties Press, 2014), Alina (Blackstaff Press, 2006) and Woundlicker (Blackstaff Press, 2005). He lives in Belfast.

Translation Rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Peninsula           Literary Fiction   

Tanya Ravenswater

Peninsula, the second novel from published author, Tanya Ravenswater is a beautifully told love story with a dark secret at its heart.

Published by Dalzell Press in November 2020.

Tanya Ravenswater’s first novel was Jacques (BonnierZaffre, 2017). She lives in Cheshire.

Translation rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

The Stamp of Beauty   Quality Women’s Commercial Fiction               

Fionola Meredith  

This highly original and unsettling novel from Irish journalist, Fionola Meredith charts the course of an unlikely and deeply dysfunctional relationship between a young woman and a much older man in a contemporary setting.

Fionola Meredith is a writer, broadcaster and commentator, based in Belfast. She contributes regular features, comment pieces and reviews to the Irish Times, and writes a weekly opinion column in the Belfast Telegraph. She is also a frequent contributor to BBC Northern Ireland current affairs and discussion programmes, debating the moral, social and political issues of the day.   

Published by Dalzell Press in January 2023

Translation rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk