Open Book Society is back and happy to announce another amazing TLC Book tours! Today we bring you author Michael Hurley’s healing novel The Vineyard. Be sure to keep reading to know more about the book, the author, our review here, and more. Enjoy!
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About The Vineyard:
Like most literary fiction, The Vineyard is a multi-layered novel. Several themes and stories are presented at once—some directly, some obliquely, some allegorically—through the lives of the central characters. On one level, The Vineyard is a simple story about three friends who decide to spend the summer together on a beautiful island in New England, ten years after college. They drink wine. They fight. They laugh. They cry. They throw parties. They have sex. A wedding looms. Someone is pregnant. Someone is cheating. Love may be real or it may be hollow. Friendships are tested by pride and jealousy and dishonesty. They support and undermine and betray and forgive each other. Charlotte struggles to recover from the loss of her baby three years ago to cancer. Dory struggles with the legacy of her rich and famous family. Turner struggles with feelings of self-doubt and a need for the adulation of men. For some readers, these events will comprise the entirety of the story. The careful reader will discover, however, that The Vineyard uses these elements and the amorphous persona of “the fisherman” to confront the characters with larger questions: What is the meaning of faith, and where is the line between faith and superstition? What is the literal truth of the faith stories we have been telling ourselves for millennia, and what is the added embroidery of time and wishful thinking? What do we believe about heaven and hell, and by what authority does anyone really know what happens after we die? What masks do we place on the faces of good and evil, and what is the truth that lies beneath? On a deeper level, the story is about how the three main characters, and in turn the reader, attempt to answer these questions.
About author Michael Hurley:
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, is about four people whose destiny is tied to a mystical schooner found adrift off the Outer Banks. It was awarded the Chanticleer Reviews Grand Prize and a Somerset Prize for fiction. It also received numerous accolades in the trade press, including Publishers Weekly,Kirkus Reviews, ForeWord Reviews, BookTrib, and IndieReader. The Journal of the American Psychiatric Association featured The Prodigal in an in-depth review. Michael’s second novel, The Vineyard, is due to be released by Ragbagger Press on November 25, 2014.
For more information visit author Michael Hurley at his Social Media:
