Books
Guppy (2023)
“Who said our lives grow rings, like a tree? Leaves fall, that’s what happens. They fall.”
Split between the twin realities of a modern-day research institute for the mind and the constraints of a royal court in the distant past, two unconnected lives begin to merge in myriad ways. Guppy weaves together the unfolding microgenesis of disparate worlds, connected and unconnected, real and imagined, immediate and distant, to reveal that each and every observed narrative stability is already shifting, unfolding, and brilliantly diverse; indeed, as we find out, we all lead lives fraught with the possibility of shocking conclusions. A fusion of myth, magic, and wonder and the stories we make for ourselves, Guppy is a sustained exploration of the fluidity of time and its effect on two introspective young individuals, both of whom dream of escaping the oppressive worlds around them for something new.
“The mythic adventure coincides with the urge to autonomy, or an assertion of separation out of dependency, as with a resolution of the subjective into veridical fact. … We are all potential myth-makers.”
Jason W. Brown, Clinical Professor, Neurology (retd.), New York University Medical Center.
Herring (2024)
Might it not be possible, just for once, to see the sea? he’d almost said those words, holding back at the last minute …
This carefully constructed novel unravels across one all-embracing, tumbling, breathtaking sentence to encapsulate the twin realities of a blind couple who have been promised a cure for their blindness and an all-too-human university professor who falls prey to a graduate student. A single sentence it may be, but Herring ultimately forces us to confront the perennial questions of searching and suffering and the price we must pay for an authentic life. Perfect for readers of what Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song, named “state-of-our-soul” novels, and for those who enjoy dystopian stories but who are only too aware that any hope there may be is in the here and now.
A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, this novel, the second part of The Catch Trilogy – the first, Guppy, was #1 free Kindle bestseller in “British and Irish Fiction” in the United States and the United Kingdom – will perplex you at first, and then draw you in, only to shock you to your core as you become a culpable player in the unfolding fusion of the absurd and the grotesque.
“Disquieting …” Jason Brown, author of Mental States and Conceptual Worlds.