Dear readers, allow me to introduce you to Michael Hurley, author of The Vinevyard. This is literary fiction novel, which will become available on December 1st from Ragbagger Press. To promote the launch of his novel, Michael is doing a virtual book tour (from November 3 - 28, 2014) with Goddess Fish Promotions.
For this occasion, Michael will be giving away a $50 Amazon/BN gift certificate to a randomly drawn commenter via rafflecopter. Here is the link to post your comment:
Blurb
Ten years after college, three very different women reunite for a
summer on Martha’s Vineyard. As they come to grips with various challenges in
their lives, an encounter with a reclusive fisherman threatens to change
everything they believe about their world—and each other.
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Excerpt
Chapter 21
Climbing up the dune, she stumbled
from little avalanches of sand that slipped beneath her feet. The boy caught
her and pulled her up. His hand was smooth and warm and young. It felt good to
her to hold a boy’s hand again.
At the top of the dune, the salt air
swept over and around her face and hair. The ocean was shimmering, limitless.
There was nothing around them but the sea and the wind and the sand—which is
why she had come to this, her new favorite place on the Vineyard. Only today
she was going to have to share it with a gangly skinflint of a boy who stood
there still grinning at her, the wind tossing a lone, blond cowlick back and
forth on top of his head like a bobble-head doll.
Perhaps he expected another kiss.
She assured herself he wouldn’t be getting one. After all, she had grown better
at restraining her impulses in the two months since that first ferry ride.
“I thought you’d be married and off
on your honeymoon by now,” Charlotte said, glad finally to be back on offense
after nearly rolling down the dune.
She made a point of not looking at
him. Teenage boys with racehorse metabolisms and zero body fat were very fond
of not wearing shirts, and while the cheerleading squad down the beach probably
found that exciting, Charlotte thought it was important that she not appear to
agree.
She kept looking out to sea as she spoke,
as if the water were far more interesting than the boy or what he might have to
say, which in truth it was not. When the silence became awkward, she turned to
see if he were even paying attention. He was staring off at the horizon. She
followed his gaze.
“Long story,” he said, finally.
In the pause that followed, it
became clear that the story, long or short, was not likely to be told.
Charlotte sensed a wound that was something more than shyness. It provoked an
unwanted and involuntary surge of maternalism in her.
“I’m Charlotte,” she said, extending
her hand. “I’ve been told I’m a good listener to long stories.”
The boy looked at her and took her
hand for the second time. He did not complete the introduction but simply held
her hand in his. He wasn’t coy; it just didn’t occur to him that his name was
at all important to her.
In his bare feet he was not as tall
as she remembered, and he seemed younger. He wasn’t a child, but he couldn’t
have been older than twenty-two, if that. Separated from the rough girl who had
been hanging on him on the ferry, he looked less like a greaser and more like a
California surfer. The difference somehow mattered to Charlotte. It felt weird
that it mattered.
She hadn’t intended to be his
company, nor had she asked him for his, but the top of the dune was not wide.
When she wandered away the few feet it allowed and spread her blanket, he
followed and sat beside her. He offered a half-empty bottle of spiced rum she
hadn’t noticed he had been dangling from his left hand. She didn’t usually
drink that early in the morning—or to be more precise, she never did—but
somehow she sensed this wasn’t the time or the place to accentuate the
differences in their ages and manners. She wanted to hear his story, and she
wanted him to feel free to tell it.
Still, he said nothing. Instead, he
sat next to her and peered out at the sea as if they were an old married
couple, silent and content merely to have each other’s company.
The voices of the others rose and
fell periodically on the air, coming from fifty yards away in the direction of
skiff down the beach. That the boy’s friends didn’t seem in a hurry to join him
suggested that they, too, knew he needed some space. Charlotte could hear them
laughing and groaning and grunting, trying to pry the keel of their boat out of
the sand with the help of the tide that slowly rose around it.
She leaned back on the towel and
continued to follow the boy’s gaze out to sea. He had an odd intensity about
him, as if he were expecting something was about to happen out there—a missile
launch or mermaid eruption or something. On the third pass of the rum, he
turned to look at her.
“We were supposed to be having a
baby,” he said.
“We?”
“The girl and me—the one you saw on
the ferry.”
"And . . .?”
“And nothing. She lied to me. I
heard about it from one of her girlfriends who called me from back home. Said
she couldn’t keep quiet anymore. That she felt it was wrong. She said my
girlfriend wasn’t pregnant—never had been. She just made that up to get me to
take her away from her old man. Not that I can blame her. He used to beat her .
. .”
Charlotte had not forgotten the
girl’s blistering right hook, and now she realized where it came from. She must
have given the old man as good as she got.
“ . . . but it was a damned lie just
the same.”
Charlotte said nothing, which didn’t
seem to faze him. “A damned lie,” he said again, looking back toward the sea.
“Is that why you were getting
married?”
“She must have thought so, but I
would have married her anyway—baby or no baby.”
“And so now you’re not—getting
married, I mean?”
“You can’t build a marriage on a
lie,” he said, looking at her with an expression of surprise, which she took to
mean that he would have guessed someone so much older would have been a little
wiser.
Charlotte let the proverb hang in
the air. It was true enough, in theory, but in reality her own marriage and,
she had come to believe, a great many others—perhaps even the majority—were
rather elaborately built on a foundation of lies. True love was a myth, as far
as she was concerned.
“’Think about it,’ you said to me,
back then,” he continued. “Do you remember?”
“I do, but I was …” She started to
explain her bizarre conduct on the ferry that she realized, as soon as she
began, made no difference to anyone now. He cut her off.
“Truth is, apart from wondering why
you was such a damn lunatic and where the hell you had come from, I didn’t need
to think about it. In fact, I was pretty excited about it. That’s what I guess
you didn’t know—and how could you. I’m sure I looked like just a punk to you.”
“Still do, actually.” She said this
to be witty and cute, which it was not, and which alarmed her, as if her mouth
had suddenly detached itself from her brain. She regretted the words as soon as
they were spoken. Another lie told to the poor boy. He seemed rather Byronesque
to her, in fact, and not at all like a punk, but she didn’t think he would
understand why, so she left it.
“I was excited to be a father,” he
continued, indignantly. A tear rolled down. He was struggling to keep his
emotions in check. She had had no idea. She felt suddenly even more mortified
at her glibness a moment ago.
It was either the best or worst of
all possible combinations, depending on the eye of the beholder. Here was this
painfully earnest boy, wounded and still suffering at the hands of a conniving
and thoughtless girlfriend. Here was this older woman, herself conflicted and
out of touch with her own feelings about love and sex and marriage. Between
them was a half-empty bottle of rum, and all around them was sunshine and the
sea.
© 2014 by M. C. Hurley. All rights
reserved.
Author bio and links
Michael
Hurley and his wife Susan live near Charleston, South Carolina. Born and raised
in Baltimore, Michael holds a degree in English from the University of Maryland
and law from St. Louis University.
The Prodigal,
Michael’s debut novel from Ragbagger Press, received the Somerset Prize for
mainstream fiction and numerous accolades in the trade press, including
Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, ForeWord Reviews, BookTrib, Chanticleer
Reviews, and IndieReader. It is currently in development for a feature film by
producer Diane Sillan Isaacs. Michael’s second novel, The Vineyard, is due to
be released by Ragbagger Press in December 2014.
Michael’s
first book, Letters from the Woods,
is a collection of wilderness-themed essays published by Ragbagger Press in
2005. It was shortlisted for Book of the
Year by ForeWord magazine. In 2009,
Michael embarked on a two-year, 2,200 mile solo sailing voyage that ended with
the loss of his 32-foot sloop, the Gypsy Moon, in the Windward Passage between
Cuba and Haiti in 2012. That voyage and the experiences that inspired him to
set sail became the subject of his memoir, Once
Upon A Gypsy Moon, published in 2013 by Hachette Book Group.
When
he is not writing, Michael enjoys reading and relaxing with Susan on the porch
of their rambling, one-hundred-year-old house.
His fondest pastimes are ocean sailing, playing piano and classical
guitar, cooking, and keeping up with an energetic Irish terrier, Frodo Baggins.
Website: www.mchurley.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mchurleybooks
Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the excerpt, thank you.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting bio.
ReplyDelete