Dear Reader . . .
One Irish autumn evening,
in a little picturesque train station,
I noticed a graceful young woman sitting alone;
she looked to be waiting for someone to arrive.
Over the next week I re-visited the station on
five occasions to photograph it in different light.
The woman was there every time,
still waiting.
On the day I was to leave
we somehow found ourselves closer to each other.
She smiled at me, warmly. I smiled back.
Our eyes held in a sort of silent conversation.
She leaned closer,
like she was about to talk to me, maybe tell me something.
But suddenly her head dropped;
she turned away.
I sensed that she was waiting for a dream,
a dream that would never show up.
But what if, I thought . . . what if that dream . . .
She inspired this novel.
I couldn’t make her the main character,
she’s too much of a mystery.
So I wrote a bigger story around a driven man,
and married the two.
Thanks for reading it.
Enjoy!
Joseph Éamon Cummins
On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland Description:
A fleeing man, a woman trapped in long-gone love, a covenant demanding irrational courage.
Ten years ago 17-year-old Irishman Tony MacNeill went to a US penitentiary for a crime he denied; Lenny Quin was queen of Manhattan art circles, soon to succumb to a mind that stopped working.
They meet in a tiny seafaring village in Ireland. Both are obsessive, both exceptional. Tony’s oath is sworn: become who he was meant to be, belong again to a place, maybe to someone. For Lenny, the future lies entombed in the past; she’s elegant and odd, some say dangerous.
Together their fire is intimate – and igniting. They fight to connect, stay sane, and defy fate, for the chance to love.
But others force them apart, and secrets and silence fog what’s true. Then her sudden disappearance sparks a spine-chilling crisis, and their past lives start coming to light: his taking to the streets at fourteen, loose courage, injustice; Lenny’s walkout on celebrity in Manhattan, heroic zeal in wartime Iraq, reclusiveness.
Battling all in past and present that would divide them, for all they together might become, Tony MacNeill will need to be unstoppable . . . again.
From Ireland to America to the underbelly of Baghdad, this critically-acclaimed new novel by Dubliner Joseph Éamon Cummins explores the passions of characters dealing dangerously with the need to love and belong, the mountains that must be climbed when these are denied, and the frailty and resilience of the human heart.
