Books by Greg Fields

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  The Bright Freight of Memory

  In the end I believe our flaws define us more than our virtues. Shakespeare’s greatest plays, the tragedies, revolved around their heroes’ flaws rather than their glories.

   

  Matthew Cooney and Donal Mannion shared their time as boys in a rundown neighborhood, without fathers, without comfort, without a sense of tomorrow, then went their separate ways, one to chase the trappings of maturity, the other to the streets. Their days shrouded in boredom, their nights filled with the thrill of the chase, each sought his place and his purpose.

  Within their struggles are the challenges of escape, of outrunning the roll of the dice that placed them where they are, and, in the end, of defining what it means to be alive, to constantly strive for the things that are just out of reach.

  
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  Through the Waters and the Wild

  “I was hungry, seeing myself starving for want of something I could not define. I sought it constantly, sought it at every turn, searched every face I met for hints of it, looked everywhere I could conceive. I lost time trying to slake this unquenchable thirst, trying to satisfy an endlessly burning hunger. But in the end I knew precisely what I had been after all along. It is the folly of the young, part of their particular curse, to be so unaware, to be blind as well as hungry. To be in exile from themselves and not know they are away.”

  Haunted by lost loves and limping through a lifeless career, Conor Finnegan’s discontent mirrors the restlessness of his grandfather Liam, caught as a young man in the crossfire of the Irish Civil War. Drawing from Liam’s wisdom and courage, Conor seeks to reinvent his character and reclaim passions made numb by neglect and loss.

  Through the Waters and the Wild addresses the timeless questions, “Where shall I go now? What shall I do?”

   

  
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  Arc of the Comet

  ARC OF THE COMET, a lyrical, evocative examination of promise, potential and loss, follows Conor Finnegan, a handsome, charismatic, athletic young man, and Tom McIlweath, a shy and insecure Everyman desperately seeking harmony and acceptance. Over the course of several years, their fates overlap as Finnegan learns the lessons of hubris —through a brilliant college career and then on to Capitol Hill—imposed by an unwillingness to compromise his ideals, while McIlweath struggles with his own fuzzy and indistinct future. First loves, lost loves, friendships crafted in the crucibles of shared space and shared pressures defined their journey. In the process, they come to separate conclusions that place them once again in disparate places, with disparate expectations of what comes next.

   

  
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