Craig Newnes

Tearagh't Craig Newnes

After the remains of the Armada hobbled back to Spain, an extraordinary document - part diary, part love letter - is discovered on a remote island off the coast of Ireland. When it is translated, it reveals - not treachery nor evidence of Spanish military ambition - but something about the human condition. Because love, loss, laughter and the madness of war are all in Tearagh't. This is an evocative and passionate novel, like no other in its ability to take you into another age. The author has developed a whole new language, which brings the experience of being on a ship in the Armada alive, as it battles its way down the English Channel, interspersed by some strange, incognito runs ashore. The diary is complicated by the Jewish origins of the narrator and his conversation in his head with his lover back home in sixteenth century Spain. But the lover, as it turns out, is also thinking about him - and she sounds remarkably modern... Will Isidore and his great love ever be reunited? Can that kind of passion ever be kept apart? Yet there is Isidore in his remote island prison - how is anything else possible? Then fate takes a peculiar hand... "Falling in love isn't in your control. It's a wonderfully accurate phrase, isn't it? You fall, with amazing luck, you both fall into it. It's like a bottomless, heavenly well. You both tumble, then plunge. Down and down. Holding hands ... but luck never holds you. One day, one of you hits the side of the well. The other keeps falling, always hurting - knowing your souls are no longer bound, no longer one in this life. That somewhere, far above you, lies the broken body that can only be touched now in dreams." "Sexy, gripping, brilliant..." Abigail Bray