The Islandman

"Like in Connemara, the water was exquisitely cold and made him sigh in its shocking embrace as the green-gold of the waves covered and possessed him. He had been only a short time living on the island and this now felt like a green-golden baptism, an icy inauguration, which he experienced deep down as a bright acceptance of his untoward presence on the edge of his country and his continent, the edge of the western world. 'I am the new Playboy of the Western World!' he called out loudly to the deserted beach, while laughing to himself. Inwardly, he added quietly, self-mockingly, 'some Playboy!'... What was he actually, in his new island state, but a capsized and marooned traveller, abandoned and lonely, fleeing his memories, exiled from his own life? He was not a 'Playboy' of the western or of any world. He was Robinson Crusoe d'Amour. Exiled, marooned, loveless." Tom Quinn's lyrical new novel of love, loss, heartbreak, and grief, tells the tale of a man, Harry, on the run from the tragic shadows that have fallen over his life. But where will his flight to an island off the west coast of Ireland take him? Will it lead him to forgetting and peace or to despair and perhaps madness? Or can his sojourn on the island in the Atlantic lead him back to life and even to love? Read "The Islandman" and discover for yourself what happens when you have gone to the extreme edge of the western world, and there is nowhere left to go.