On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland
Read On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland Online
Authors: Joseph Éamon Cummins
Dear Reader . . .
One late-summer evening a long time ago,
in a little picturesque train station,
I noticed a graceful young woman sitting alone;
she looked to be waiting for someone.
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 leaving, our eyes engaged,
a moment of silent conversation;
she smiled, seemed about to say something.
Then her head dropped, she turned away.
I never saw her again.
Never knew why she was there or who she longed for.
But 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
May 2016
A fleeing man,
a woman trapped in long-gone love,
a covenant demanding irrational courage . . .
Ten years ago, 17-year-old Tony MacNeill went to the 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 . . .
But unnerving events force them apart, and secrets and silence fog what’s true. A strange disappearance and spine-chilling drama draw out old woundings: his taking to the streets at fourteen, soul-deep scarring, compulsive courage; Lenny’s walkout on celebrity in NY, heroic zeal in wartime Iraq, her reclusiveness.
Against all that divides them . . . for all they might be,
Tony MacNeill will be unstoppable.
From Ireland to America to the underbelly of Baghdad, this deeply moving story spins with surprises, unveiling two impassioned people, the extremes they’ll go to, and the frailty and resilience of the human heart.
Dubliner Joseph Éamon Cummins, award-wining non-fiction author, taught creative writing and psychology for ten years, earning multiple Best Professor citations. He now leads workshops internationally in human achievement and resilience, and, occasionally, psychology in fiction writing. He lives in Ireland with his wife, Kathy. This is his first novel.
On the Edge of the Loch
A Psychological Novel set in Ireland
Joseph Éamon Cummins
Dedicated to my wife, Kathleen Argenti Cummins,
a light that never fades.
On the Edge of the Loch:
A Psychological Novel set in Ireland
Copyright © Joseph Éamon Cummins 2016: All rights reserved
First published 2016 by Moon Abbey Media
Moon Abbey is an imprint of MindWave Limited, (Ireland)
EB 1: 0: 0:
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
This eBook: ISBN 978-0-9935452-1-4
Trade Paperback: ISBN 978-0-9935452-0-7
Audio version for release in autumn 2016
For more information, articles and interviews see author website:
For media interviews, courses, lectures and speaking engagements:
Codes 1-5: E2201, E3312, E4423 E5534, E6645
Extras in this ebook . . .
A Guide for Book Clubs, Teachers and Writing Students
and an Interview with Joseph Éamon Cummins
** Review Request **
When you’re through reading, I’d be really grateful if you’d write a short review on my Amazon reviews page (link below). Many thanks: JÉC
JosephEamonCummins @ Amazon
Table of Contents
Translations from Gaeilge (The Irish Language)
Interview with Joseph Éamon Cummins
A Guide for Book Clubs, Teachers and Writing Students
(‘Loch’ is the Gaelic word for lake.)
Prologue
A lifetime had died since Tony MacNeill took to the streets fists up. Even now, that feeling hadn’t changed. On Newark’s concrete turf he had found an arena to flaunt his Irish working-class toughness, his fast hands. What he gave away in size to his new-world peers he more than made up with guile and courage. From when he was fifteen until he was almost eighteen these had made him king, peerless among all who had challenged him unarmed. Though alienated and brazenly immigrant, his only hard-core loathing was for the sluggers whose courage came from blades and guns.
Now, at twenty-seven, after nine years in maximum-security prisons, he was free, confronting again the outside world, battling to disassemble, finally, his street brain. And believe he had choices. Nine years of blue-sky days had been taken from him, throughout which he had fought relentlessly to save his mind. But what was done was done, he accepted; building a new life would demand more.
When his compulsion to move ahead caused him to reflect, it was clear he had been drowning in one abyss after another. Ever since he descended into New Jersey: February 27th 1980, one day after his fourteenth birthday, the day his parents abandoned Ireland, as he saw it, for the American dream, and traded his green world for a grey maze that sent him to hell.
Despite all that had happened, though, and what he had been forced to become, he’d survived. So too had the memories of his childhood and who he once had been.
It wasn’t that he could escape what had happened, he knew too well, or recapture the youth Newark had stolen. Nor wash away the blood of Jesus Pomental, or close those dead sixteen-year-old Latino eyes.
No, there’d be no such escape. But he had in the years since then, in certain ways, re-sculpted his brain, grown up, grown wiser. What was left, he believed, was to blot out the stain of death, the stench and violation of prison cells, and defuse his sometimes still fiery mind. And one day, if he could, exit Jesus’ gaze.
