Current Projects:  Non-Fiction

Incompatible with Life:            Memoir

A Memoir of Grave Illness, Great Love, and Survival

Michael J. Tallon

During the last Great Ice Age, a nearly imperceptible change in the genome of a Neanderthal woman initiated a chain of events that led doctors, 40,000 years later, to declare Michael Tallon Incompatible with Life. They were wrong, and having recovered from the devastation of Hereditary Hemochromatosis, he has reclaimed their words as the title of his medical memoir. The story of his connection to that protohuman ancestor, the genetic iron-processing disorder she bequeathed, and how she taught him to be thankful for his mortality, is a small yet fascinating part of this evocative, enlightening, and extraordinarily page-turning story of grave illness, great love, and survival.

Incompatible With Life sits comfortably on the shelves between Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire. As with Kalanithi’s heartrending self-elegy, the memoir delves into the physical, intellectual, and spiritual disruptions of terminal illness. Both works draw in the reader by focusing the trauma of rapidly approaching mortality through the lens of a lifetime’s learning. We take the art, history, music, myth, and magic we’ve learned over decades and shape life’s ending into a story of love, hope, purpose, and meaning. Like Cahalan’s work, Michael’s story is a fast-paced, high-stakes medical mystery with unforeseen twists and daring risks as doctors struggle to understand what has driven an otherwise healthy 48-year-old man to the brink of death – and how it is that he somehow miraculously survives. And how it causes him to reevaluate everything he knows about life, death and the universe.

Michael Tallon began his professional life in the early 1990s as a schoolteacher in Brooklyn. After thirteen years in the education racket, he took a sabbatical in 2004 to study Spanish in Latin America. Plans changed, and his sabbatical became a series of new careers in bartending, writing, and magazine publishing. In 2015, he fell gravely ill from a previously undetected genetic disorder known as Hereditary Hemochromatosis.

He lives and writes in Antigua, Guatemala.

Keeping the Peace              Memoir/Policing

One woman’s journey through policing, trauma and beyond

Hannah Bailey

In 1999, Hannah Bailey joined ‘L’ division of West Midlands police as a 22-year-old probationer fresh out of training at Ryton-on-Dunsmore police college. Bright, resourceful and full of enthusiasm, she’d been one of the top recruits in her intake and such was her perceived potential that, unusually, she had offers of placements from senior management in two different parts of the division.

By 2011 however, Hannah was suffering from severe burnout and complex PTSD but, largely unaware of this, she felt compelled to simply keep going in the job – by then she was working in CID in Major Crime. Then, later that year, a diagnosis of breast cancer – at the age of 34 – stopped her in her tracks and forced her to take long-term sick leave. After nine months, having successfully undergone treatment, she was given the all-clear and able to return to work. But three short months later, and a year to the day of her first diagnosis, she was told the cancer had returned – this time in a more aggressive form, as triple-negative breast cancer. At this point, she resigned from her job and left the career she had once believed to be her one true vocation.

The first part of this book is Hannah’s immersive first-person account of her 15 years as a police officer. We follow her six years’ service as a ‘blue light’ uniformed officer, tasked with responding to emergency call-outs of all kinds – including road traffic accidents, domestic violence incidents, stabbings, shootings, crowd control, rapes and murders, suicide incidents, and so on. We see how, working in a team with a 5:1 ratio of male to female officers, she felt she had more to prove than her male counterparts; and how, almost inevitably, she was chosen as the one to undertake specialised training in dealing with victims of rape and other sexual violence. We then follow her as she moves into CID to work on Major Crime investigations, many of these in the area of serious sexual offences, including historical rape and sex abuse cases. We see how her initial love and enthusiasm for the job is gradually eroded, due to the types of crime she is tasked to deal with, the nature of the criminal justice system and the restructuring of UK policing under then Home Secretary Theresa May. And how she begins to struggle without realising the extent of the physical and emotional toll the job has been taking on her over a very long time.

Part two looks at how Hannah managed to navigate potentially life-threatening illness and emerge not only clear of cancer, but with a whole new understanding of her mental and physical health, and the intimate way in which the two are connected. She embarks on a journey not only to heal her body but to rediscover her essential self, and she emerges with a new sense of purpose and a fresh outlook on what is most important in life.

The third part of the book describes how Hannah uses her own experience of policing and trauma to retrain and begin a new career as a psychotherapist and wellbeing coach, supporting others working in the police and emergency services. She founded her own business, Blue Light Wellbeing, offering trauma therapy, training and education to those individuals and teams who, as she knows first-hand, are the last to ask and often need it the most.

This is a truly uplifting story of a young woman who turned her life around from the rock bottom of emotional burnout and life-threatening illness to the discovery of a new vocation and the forging of a remarkable career in which she excels at helping others who are going through the kinds of crises she has managed to overcome with such tenacity and positivity.

Hannah Bailey was in the West Midlands police for 15 years as both a uniformed officer and detective. She is now a trained psychotherapist specialising in trauma-related conditions.  She lives near Birmingham.

World Rights:  paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

The Ghost of Tenth Street    memoir

Paul Spillenger

On a cold February day in 2014, Paul Spillenger was going through the contents of the New York apartment he’d grown up in and where his father, the Abstract Expressionist painter Ray Spillenger, had recently died.  As he emptied the closets and pulled open boxes and portfolios long ago secreted away under beds and behind couches, he realized he’d discovered a cache of paintings he’d never seen before, and which it was unlikely anyone still living had ever seen: nearly 200 oil paintings, some in frames, others on canvas, still others on board, as well as over 2,000 works on paper.  As he catalogued, measured and photographed the art, another Ray Spillenger began to emerge, one Paul had never known.  He could discern in the work an intelligence and soul that was entirely new to him.  At first, he could not bring together his sense of the artist who had made the paintings and the father who had never been a father, a figure he associated mainly with rage, sarcastic criticism, violence and absence.  But over time he was able to start integrating the two as the same man.  This spurred him to delve into Ray’s past, through the papers and photographs he’d left behind and through interviews with artists and friends who’d known him. 

Ray Spillenger is the abstract expressionist that time forgot.  But he was anything but nameless to his peers.  His friend, the painter Pat Passlof, called him “the most brilliant unknown painter of his generation.”  He lived and worked in the heart of the AbEx movement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was part of a coterie that included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Milton Resnick, Joan Mitchell, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline and many other renowned artists of the era.  He was also Paul Spillenger’s dad, and Paul grew up against the backdrop of this unique time in the history of 20th-century art.

Ray was born in 1924 and lived in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn until he enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1943.  Following the end of World War II, he finished his degree in graphic design from Pratt Institute and attended the legendary Summer 1948 session at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where he studied with Josef Albers and Willem de Kooning and got to know John Cage, Buckminster Fuller and Merce Cunningham, among other artists.  In 1949-50 Ray lived and studied painting in Italy, and on his return to the States he moved into a loft on the Lower East Side.  He quickly reconnected with de Kooning, who became a good friend, as well as Pollock, Resnick, Newman, Mitchell, and Kline, with whom he was especially close.  He hung out regularly at the Cedar Tavern and was one of the early members of “The Club,” where the artists met to grouse, debate and drink.

In 1954 Ray and his girlfriend (later wife) Marian Katz moved into a cold-water flat at 90 University Place, and when their first son, Paul, came along in 1956, they relocated to a somewhat larger apartment on the corner of Third Avenue and Tenth Street, in the middle of the Tenth Street Co-op Gallery scene and right across the street from de Kooning’s studio.  The whole area was ground zero for the Abstractionist Expressionist/Action Painting scene.  In 1957 he helped found the March Gallery, with Pat Passlof, Elaine de Kooning and Felix Pasilis.  In 1960 Ray had his first one-man show and started selling paintings.  Then the bottom fell out that same year, when Pop Art began to attract attention.  By 1962 most of the co-op galleries had closed, and many of the painters had moved out of the city.  As the movement died, Ray grew withdrawn and bitter, and by the late 1970s, he’d stopped painting altogether.  He wouldn’t come back to it until the early 1990s.

Paul grew up in a tiny, cramped apartment on East Tenth Street in the 1950s and 60s, in the midst of Abstract Expressionist painters, writers and intellectuals of the time.  His extended family was comprised of brilliant, crazy, charismatic, self-destructive artists.  De Kooning was his go-to babysitter for a while; Kline was a familiar presence (Paul would name his son after him).  He shared a hot tub with Allen Ginsberg.  His first joint came from W.H. Auden (who had no use for it).  Frank O’Hara and Paul Goodman showed up at his parents’ Thanksgiving parties.  His first friend was Lisa de Kooning, Bill’s only child, who was born three weeks before Paul. At the Cedar and at the various loud and smoky parties he was dragged along to, he watched the goings-on and naturally believed all grown-ups were like this.  He experienced both the exhilaration of the group in its heyday and the pathos as it gradually broke up. 

Ray was for the most part an absentee father – either giving the best of himself to painting and the coterie with whom he felt most himself or, even when he was around the apartment, not really wanting to be there, feeling that domestic life was stealing precious time and energy from what he really wanted to be doing.  He never talked about art with his family, and when he painted at home, Paul and his brother Clyde were not permitted in that corner of the apartment.  So there was a wall between both the man and his work, on the one hand, and his children, on the other, that did not allow for any kind of intimacy.

But in the end, the son was able to slough off the old stories, the core narratives that had helped him process the lasting pain of a dysfunctional childhood and explain who his father was and why he was the way he was.  He allowed the art to reveal the artist, an artist who was also his father.  Gradually, he came to know the father as the complex, imperfect person he was, forgive him for it and accept the gift the father had, in death, given him.

Structured as series of vignettes from his father’s life, the author’s life and the world of the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, The Ghost of Tenth Street paints a vivid picture of what it was like to grow up in the midst of the vibrant lower Manhattan art scene of the period and to live with a painter who suffered from the depression and rage of watching the movement from which he drew his principal sense of self disintegrate in the early 1960s.

The Ghost of Tenth Street is structured, not chronologically, but thematically, because the experience that led to these epiphanies – and, indeed, to the writing of this book – is not amenable to chronology.  The first chapter is about Ray’s death, the last about the birth of a relationship between father and son.  Each of the book’s chapters hearkens back to ideas developed in the previous one and plants a thematic seed for the reading of the following one.  Each vignette calls for its own tone and style – sometimes starkly narrative, sometimes analytical, sometimes humorous. Taken as a whole, the memoir is a compelling and exquisitely written mosaic that depicts the movement from anger and resentment to understanding and forgiveness, a transformation made possible only through the medium of art.

Paul Spillenger is a born-and-bred New Yorker who grew up in what came to be called the East Village.  Early on he was a fairly serious musician and then a practicing poet.  He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Medieval Studies) from Columbia University in 1992 and taught English and literature for several years before becoming lead reporter and columnist for a trucking newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas.  In 2000 he started writing documentary scripts for National Geographic, Discovery, the BBC, Animal Planet and other broadcasters and was nominated for two primetime Emmy Awards for writing and producing the 11-part series Life, a joint production of the BBC and Discovery.  Since 2023 he’s been semi-retired and focused on writing, selling his father’s paintings and building a house on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.  He is the proud father of a son, Franz, and grandfather to a pair of gorgeous identical twin girls, Maya and Fiona.  Paul has been married to Leslie Schwerin for 22 years, and they share their life with the remarkable dog, Isabelle.  He currently divides his time between Cape Breton and Silver Spring, Maryland.

World Rights:  paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

The Inside Story         Memoir   

Poetry in Prison          

Susan Bennett

This is a book about the poems that bring light in the darkest place. Susan Bennett leads reading groups with the men and women in Northern Ireland’s notorious jails - HMP Maghaberry and Hydebank Wood Young Offenders’ Centre & Women’s Prison. In this most unlikely of settings, and after a shaky start, she watches in awe as the power of words begins to work its magic.

Interspersed with a first-hand account of the rough, spiky conversations between the participants in the prison groups, some of the stories and poems that have led to the most fruitful conversations are included. You can read works from authors ranging from Maya Angelou to Shakespeare, stories that cover everything from regret to redemption. Reading the poems in the context of the conversations that they sparked in prison will show why they mean so much to readers who have nearly lost all hope.

As she reads along with people on the inside, Susan Bennett confront major life issues including regret, faith, hope and love. What word or phrase will hit home for someone? Can a poem really make a difference?

Most of all, this book will show that literature has the power to heal and transform, even in the darkest place.

World Rights:  susan@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

One Year                    Memoir

Travels Through Hope and Healing

“But we can’t possibly pack up our lives and just run away in a van for a whole year. Can we?”

Susan and Chris live normal busy lives until their mid thirties when a shock diagnosis is delivered to both of them, in the same week, in the same hospital. Living with the uncertainty of multiple sclerosis continues to push travel dreams further away. Then a collection of final straws creates the nudge they need to finally take the plunge and hit the road. Bereavement and burnout add a heavy weight, and only the open road can lift it. If they don’t go now, it might be too late.

One Year is a travel memoir that charts the journey around western Europe and Scandinavia in their beloved campervan. Engine breakdowns, Spanish flu, French doctors and many hours spent getting lost. But also new connections, art, nature, beauty. Seventeen countries, three hundred and sixty one days, sixteen thousand miles. One year to find hope and healing.

In taking that first step onto the unknown road ahead, unexpected lessons emerge: how to look up at big skies, how to stop and breathe, how to find courage. And as the miles pass by, Susan begins to look inward too, and soon finds a renewed sense of her place in the world. Finding space to say goodbye to a lost brother, learning to live with an uncertain future and, most of all, the power of nature to heal and restore.

One Year is a life-affirming true story of stopping in order to start again. It’s about coming to terms with grief and illness but it’s also about our capacity for joy and hope. Ultimately, it’s a tale of hope.

World Rights:  susan@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Susan Bennett is a writer and media commentator based in Belfast. She’s a regular contributor to BBC Radio Ulster, and has been writing her weekly blog, Shedwriting, since October 2020. Her work has appeared in The Simple Things, Books Ireland and she was shortlisted for the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize in October 2023. 

Translation Rights

Being with Cows                Mind, Body, Spirit/Memoir

Dave Mountjoy

An intensely transformational story of how grief became gratitude in the presence of a humble herd of cows.

Being with Cows is an intensely powerful yet heart-warming antidote to the stresses, strains and suffering of modern life. Through a deeply tangible sense of gratitude, it tells of how tragedy became healing and transformation in the midst of a humble herd of cows and how acceptance is the key to unlocking the door to our most natural self and happiness.

The world is crying out in pain. War, climate change, health concerns (COVID – 19) and the wholesale destruction of the natural world feeds billions a daily diet of fear, confusion and uncertainty. Masses are slaves to their mobile phones and the swirling circus that is social media. Being with Cows, though apparently gentle and rhythmic in nature, smashes right through the illusion of our plastic selves and reaches out to touch the heart that lives inside us all.

The author’s brother committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in October 2016. The shock of his loss was total. Devastation does not come near it.

Being with Cows was inspired by his tragic death, for out of the ashes the phoenix does rise. It focuses both on the fallout from such a deeply shattering event and most importantly, how Life, at each and every turn, provides an opportunity for healing and total acceptance.

Healing and acceptance came in the form of the herd of cows Dave raised on his organic farm in the French Pyrenees mountains. Unlooked for and unexpected, he discovered complete and utter acceptance of the loss in their company, a healing so clean and deep that not a trace of grief remained, just gratitude for having known such a brother as he.

The book details the incredibly moving story behind these events, how a personal quest for inner healing and transformation received such unimagined support in the midst of such tragic and painful circumstances.

Dave Mountjoy is a cattle breeder, founder of Being with Cows Retreats and father of two slightly wild young boys. He is inspired by living in dedication to quietness, to acceptance and the understanding that behind the rough and tumble of everyday life, the unchanging presence of Love seeks only to guide us back into the lasting peace of the Heart.

World English Rights to Bedford Square Publishers

Translation Rights:  paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk 

Never Waste a Good Hysterectomy:                 Memoir/Women’s Health

Life lessons from a crisis

Melanie Verwoerd

“I’m a very level-headed person,” Melanie Verwoerd told the gynecological oncologist. “However, I feel like my dogs during a thunderstorm. I’m desperately trying to find somewhere to hide, but everywhere I go, it is still there.”

A week earlier, another gynecologist had paused mid-sentence during a routine ultrasound examination. Something big was wrong.

Blood tests showed elevated tumour markers and scans revealed a huge ovarian tumour with at least a 70% chance of being cancerous. A few days later a radical hysterectomy was performed.

As the terror grew, the only way for her to make sense of what was happening was to write. This book is the brutally honest reflection of the year that followed the operation.

Although it is brutally honest, it is also hope giving, and insists that women’s voices be heard.

Melanie Verwoerd is a former Member of the South African Parliament, South African Ambassador to Ireland and Executive Director of UNICEF. She is a published author, columnist and top-rated political analyst from Cape Town, South Africa.

Melanie was born into an Afrikaner family and grew up during the height of Apartheid in South Africa. At the age of twenty she married Wilhelm Verwoerd, the grandson of the former Apartheid Prime Minister HF Verwoerd, generally regarded as the architect of Apartheid. In 1990, after a brief spell at Oxford in the UK and following the unbanning of the ANC, she and her then husband returned to South Africa.

Shortly after their return Melanie met with Nelson Mandela, who encouraged her to “use her surname and voice for the bigger good”. She stunned many by joining the ANC. Her political involvement also led to her being ostracized by her community and numerous death threats from the far-right Afrikaner movements. During the first democratic elections in 1994, Melanie was elected as a Member of Parliament for the ANC under the presidency of Nelson Mandela. At the age of 27 she was the youngest female MP in the history of the South African parliament. During her time in parliament she worked closely with, amongst others, Nelson Mandela and participated in the writing of the South African Constitution. She was re-elected in 1999 and in 2001 was appointed as South African Ambassador to Ireland.

Her #1 best-selling memoir, When We Dance, was published in Ireland in November 2012. It entered the Irish bestseller list at number two and reached number one the next week. It remained in the top 10 best sellers for six weeks. The book was also published in South Africa in May 2013 under the title, The Verwoerd who toyi-toyied.  Melanie’s next book, Our Madiba: Stories and reflections of those who met Nelson Mandela was launched in 2014 by Archbishop Tutu. In 2015 she co-authored 21 at 21: A nation coming of age which features interviews with South Africans born in 1994. It was published in Germany by Peter Hammerverlag in 2017 under the title Südafrika mit 21.

In 2007 Melanie received the Tatler International Woman of the Year Award in Ireland.

World English ex SA to Dalzell Press, SA rights to SheSaid Press

Translation Rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History            Memoir

Carmel Maria Mc Mahon

In Ordinary Time is a hybrid memoir comprised of essays, poems and photographs (45,000 words). It looks at the ways “ordinary traumas”, personal and historic, reverberate through time and resonate through a life. Trauma interrupts the unity and linearity of temporality, so time is a central concern.

Drawing attention to different constructions of time, Carmel Mc Mahon sketches the evolution of a consciousness from her upbringing in the Catholic and conservative Ireland of the seventies and eighties to the New York City of today.

It is a beautifully written, unique and compelling memoir.

Carmel Mc Mahon graduated with an MA in the Liberal Arts (Biography and Memoir Track) from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in September 2020. While there, she was made the 2018/2019 writer-in-residence of the Irish Studies Department at Queens College (CUNY). She is passionate about Irish literature and particularly interested in the ways writers make use of the material of their lives.

Carmel emigrated from Ireland to the US in 1993 at age 20. She carried $500, two suitcases and a ton of invisible baggage. It has been a long journey, and she is ready to return home. With her partner and their dogs, she looks forward to taking up residence again in Ireland in October, 2021. Her writing has been published in the Irish Times, A Woman’s Thing, The Irish Echo, the Humanities Review, Longreads, and the Australian-Irish Heritage Journal. 

World English Language Rights: Duckworth Books (Feb 2023)

Translation rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

As the Smoke Clears        Memoir         

A True Story of Love, Loss, Resilience and Survival

Zoe Holohan

The harrowing true story of the Irish woman, who, on honeymoon with her new husband, was caught up in the Greek wildfires of 2018, in which her husband perished but she survived.

Zoe Holohan has worked in media for over two decades, in advertising, marketing and on creative campaign design. She has had numerous travel articles published in The Irish Independent and the Sunday World magazine . 

UK and Ireland Rights: Gill Books March 2021

All Other Rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

The Upside of Down                   Memoir/Mental Health

Tara West

The novelist’s memoir of depression and recovery.

Published by Dalzell Press in October 2020.

Tara West is the author two novels. Poets are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan (Liberties Press, 2012) and Fodder (Blackstaff Press, 2002).

Translation rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Afraid of the Dark            Memoir/Mental Health/Fatherhood

Jonny McCambridge

The Irish journalist’s memoir about his struggles with mental health issues as well as the trials and tribulations of being a full-time ‘stay-at-home’ dad to his infant son.

Published by Dalzell Press on January 26th, 2021.

Jonny McCambridge is an Irish journalist and blogger.

Translation rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk

Treasury of Mindfulness                       Mind, Body, Spirit

Tips and Techniques for Every Day

Paddy Brosnan

A collection of simple yet precious resources which will enhance readers’ lives and add to the quality of their everyday experiences Each page or entry in the Treasury will feature one of four different kinds of mindfulness tools: A Mindful Meditation, Everyday Mindfulness, Mindful Ideas, 1-Minute Mindfulness.

Published by Dalzell Press in March 2020.

Paddy Brosnan is a mindfulness teacher and inspirational speaker. A committed Buddhist, he has practiced mindfulness for 14 years and has been teaching for over four years. Paddy’s first book, This Works: How to Use Mindfulness to Calm the Hell Down and Just Be Happy was published by Hay House in October 2018.  

Audio Rights to Bolinda.

Translation rights: paul@thefeldsteinagency.co.uk