Reflections in a Tar Barrel (English / Russian edition)s

Published by Direct Media, Moscow, 2021.

Awarded the Valentin Krustev Award for Translation 2021 by the William Meredith Foundation, USA

The hero of this novel, Lofty, a young man of eccentric manner, believes he is a half-wit because everyone else tells him so, even his mother. So he has every reason to feel short-changed by the one who created him. His disenchantment with the Creator leads him into open revolt. His campaign sees him combine the roles of hawker in religious goods and keeper of a mobile brothel. Yet, in a tragi-comic way, his untutored mind grapples with the gigantic themes, the nature of God and creation, death and reincarnation, Einsteinian time, and he arrives at his own world-view, his own mystical insights.

Set in the mid-seventies, this novel explores the world through the eyes of this eccentric young man, from the West of Ireland to Paris and Lourdes. The relationship he strikes up with a prostitute on the streets of Paris leads back to the woman-starved West of Ireland and into a sequence of events which hurtle towards disaster.

Available online from Direct Media

www.directmedia.ru

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