Brian F. O'Byrne

"After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, Joanna gets hired as an assistant to Margaret, the stoic and old-fashioned literary agent of J. D. Salinger. Fluctuating between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office ... and her nights in a Brooklyn apartment with her socialist boyfriend. Joanna's main task is processing Salinger's voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters...

In 1921 Jimmy Gralton's sin was to build a dance hall on a rural crossroads in an Ireland on the brink of Civil War. The Pearse-Connolly Hall was a place where young people could come to learn, to argue, to dream; but above all to dance and have fun. As the hall grew in popularity its socialist and free-spirited reputation brought it to the attention of the church and politicians who forced Jimmy to flee and the hall to close.

After having endured extremely different career paths, the lives of three disheartened Brooklyn police officers will collide with destiny when they all wind up at the same fatal crime scene.

This daring and lyrical exploration of alienation and desperation intimately observes a family's inner lives and their relationship to each other and their environment.

Unaware of the ugly secret buried in the land he is hired to map, engineer Richard stumbles into the middle of Northern Ireland's violent and lethal past. When he finds a dead body, it whips up hostilities, treachery, bloody violence, and a hot pursuit.