Bookstore
"The White Deer"
Available in 6" x 9" paperback (208 pages) $16.00
"(Y)oung Jack Gogarty accompanies his aunt... to West Wicklow, he expects nothing more than to spend a summer with his distant relatives....he meets a cast of village characters... The author paints a wildly vivid picture of Jack's village experience, and the descriptions become more intricate as Jack looks deeper into the towns pagan rituals. Its a great literary device that immerses the reader into Jack's consciousness. Overall, the story strikes the perfect balance of fantasy and reality, juxtaposing dreamlike vignettes with everyday scenes from an Irish village, including a knockdown, drag-out football match between two rival teams... But although this tale is thought- provoking, it doesn't involve heavy lifting. Instead, it's a joyful look at what can happen when you choose to believe, to open your eyes and see what wasn't there before....A fun, folkloric tale of fairies, family, faith and fantasy."
-Kirkus Reviews-
-Kirkus Reviews-
"Faces Along the Bar"
Available in 6-1/2 x 9-1/2 Hardcover (316 pages) $25.00
Brooklyn, 1957. The Dodgers are about to move to Los Angeles; and in a largely Irish and Italian neighborhood, residents are just beginning to feel the impact of the arrival of black and Hispanic families. In Kerrigan's, the local bar, a quiet resentment is building. What had seemed permanent for so long suddenly feels threatened.
Mrs. Dahlgren has lived in the neighborhood since before her kids were born. Her son Red, a plainclothes detective, is at home in the community; his little sister Annie, a brilliant, lovely girl in her senior year of high school, is determined to go to college and succeed in the outside world. But when Annie is found murdered in an alley down the street from her home the morning after her birthday party, Toby Walters, a black teenager whom Annie was secretly dating, is swiftly and unjustly fingered as the murderer. The regulars from Kerrigan's, angered by the unspeakable crime, lead the search to find Toby - but is Toby the killer, or is he the unfortunate victim of a lynch-mob mentality fueled by prejudice and fear of change?
"Faces Along the Bar" is a powerful, evocative tale of a community swept up in the volatile racial and social tensions of the period, and a profound questioning of the reality and validity of the American dream.
Mrs. Dahlgren has lived in the neighborhood since before her kids were born. Her son Red, a plainclothes detective, is at home in the community; his little sister Annie, a brilliant, lovely girl in her senior year of high school, is determined to go to college and succeed in the outside world. But when Annie is found murdered in an alley down the street from her home the morning after her birthday party, Toby Walters, a black teenager whom Annie was secretly dating, is swiftly and unjustly fingered as the murderer. The regulars from Kerrigan's, angered by the unspeakable crime, lead the search to find Toby - but is Toby the killer, or is he the unfortunate victim of a lynch-mob mentality fueled by prejudice and fear of change?
"Faces Along the Bar" is a powerful, evocative tale of a community swept up in the volatile racial and social tensions of the period, and a profound questioning of the reality and validity of the American dream.
"The Storm"
Available in 5-1/2" x 8-1/2" paperback (208 pages) $16.00
"It is a family story-lyrical and hard, filled with compassion and leavened with a ready good humor you'll find in the back streets of Dublin."
- Frank McCourt -
"Robert Cranny's" The Storm" is a moving and powerful work of fiction. It's magic combination of poetry and insight, of unfailing artistry and unflinching honesty, make it a work of enduring significance in the canon of Irish literature."
- Peter Quinn -
"We've all heard of Artistic Distance. I'm sure - whereby a writer who has departed a locale writes more impressively about it than those who have remained in it could ever hope to do. James Joyce is probably the classic example of the phenomenon, but Robert Cranny is no mean runner up...It's a poetic book, a prose poem really, with an almost mystical devotion to nature and to the inner recesses of the impressionable mind."
- Dublin Evening Herald -
"There is a real danger in reviewing Robert Cranny's extraordinary first novel that one may do it less than justice...This is an astonishing debut."
- Irish Times -
"('The Storm') is a different breed of book...Cranny evokes his characters with undeniable feeling by writing about them as if they matter...Cranny never telegraphs his plot. He lets it flow like a force of nature."
- Chicago Sun Times -
- Frank McCourt -
"Robert Cranny's" The Storm" is a moving and powerful work of fiction. It's magic combination of poetry and insight, of unfailing artistry and unflinching honesty, make it a work of enduring significance in the canon of Irish literature."
- Peter Quinn -
"We've all heard of Artistic Distance. I'm sure - whereby a writer who has departed a locale writes more impressively about it than those who have remained in it could ever hope to do. James Joyce is probably the classic example of the phenomenon, but Robert Cranny is no mean runner up...It's a poetic book, a prose poem really, with an almost mystical devotion to nature and to the inner recesses of the impressionable mind."
- Dublin Evening Herald -
"There is a real danger in reviewing Robert Cranny's extraordinary first novel that one may do it less than justice...This is an astonishing debut."
- Irish Times -
"('The Storm') is a different breed of book...Cranny evokes his characters with undeniable feeling by writing about them as if they matter...Cranny never telegraphs his plot. He lets it flow like a force of nature."
- Chicago Sun Times -
