Daingean author's son launches novel
In a case of the apple not falling far from the tree, the son of Daingean-based author Geraldine O’Neill today (Thursday) saw his debut novel “POV” made available as an e-book on Amazon.
Thirty-three year old Chris Brosnahan, who name-checks his mother and his former English teacher at Tullamore CBS (now Colaiste Choilm) Mr Carty as inspirational in his budding writing career, had his book published by Harper Collins after writing it as part of a competition in just 30 hours.
Set 50 years into the future, POV follows the highly-skilled optometrist John Macfarlane. Macfarlane works with IDRoPs, a solution that allows people to see augmented reality. He lives a quiet life with his wife and daughters, but one day everything changes when he discovers someone is brutally murdering his patients, ripping their eyes out, and slipping away.
POV has been described as “gripping and vividly real” and “a must-read for fans of fast-paced fiction which twists and turns”. All the more impressive then, that the 20,000 word novel was written over two days in just 30 hours.
Brought up in Daingean, Chris studied theatre and acting in college in the UK and now works in marketing.
Though he’s been writing since the mid-2000s and has had a few short stories published, earlier this year was his first stab at a novel. In January, he gave up a weekend and locked himself away with other competitors for 15 hours on two consecutive days.
The result was POV, which won Chris the competition and an agreement from Harper Collins to publish his book.
Chris says he decided to do the time-restricted competition as he usually gets quite distracted when writing and he figured the competition wouldn’t give him a choice but to write.
“It was pretty exhausting,” he said, adding that he made it thanks to “a lot of coffee”. “I kind of made little bargains with myself,” he explained. “Like: ‘if I do the next 500 words I can go out and get some fresh air’.”
The 150-page book that’s now available on Amazon has in addition to POV some short stories and a writing guide from Chris. What’s even better for readers is that for the time being POV is available for just 99p.