- The Return Journey and Our Friends Electric: Two Novellas
£8.99£6.49 UK inc. pp-
Release date: January 2011
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Late for an important meeting, Swiss life insurance broker Hermann stops to tie his shoelace. When he stands up everything has changed. Unable to understand what has happened, Hermann knows only that he must leave his life in Switzerland behind and set off on a search for understanding. Moving between Zurich, Dublin, and Ireland’s Atlantic coast, The Return Journey is a novella in the tradition of Hamsun and Camus, exploring the limits of the human quest for understanding, and the possibilities of redemption within a world stripped of its traditional meanings.
‘This is a serious piece of work, skilfully and movingly accomplished.’
Lindsay Clarke, author of The Chymical Wedding, winner of the
Whitbread Prize for Fiction.
Our Friends Electric
It’s 2009 and a long time since Depeche Mode topped the charts but that doesn’t bother Tom. Classic music is classic music because it doesn’t date. Tom has recently moved in with the beautiful Lisa, a musician. He hopes their shared love of music will bring them even closer together but, unluckily for Tom, Lisa thinks he is stuck in the past and the most embarrassing part of the past ever as far as she is concerned: circa 1979-83. Our Friends Electric is a slyly comic take on the modern dating game, played out to the backdrop of music from a decade some people pretend they would rather see forgotten.
About the Author
Noel Duffy was born in Dublin in 1971 and studied Experimental Physics at Trinity College, Dublin, before turning his hand to writing. He co-edited (with Theo Dorgan) Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Poetry Ireland, 1999) and was the winner in 2003 of the START Chapbook Prize for Poetry for his collection, The Silence After. His work has appeared widely in Ireland, as well as in the UK, the US, Belgium and South Africa. More recently he was the winner of the Firewords Poetry Award and has been a recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Literature.
Noel holds an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and has taught creative writing there and at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, and scriptwriting at the Dublin Business School, Film and Media Department. He currently lives in Dublin where he writes for film and television.