Mathews Eamon

Strano Mathews Eamon

Provocative love story of young Irishman, Damien, who struggles to find shared intimacy and a sustained relationship - innocent love. His quest takes him to Glendalough monastery, to London and Bermuda. He explores issues of celibacy, love, desire, sexual diversity, lust, S&M, solitude, as well as sexual morality. Damien struggles with an ongoing dilemma: his integrity is challenged at every step by wanting to be authentically Christian as well as gay. His mentor, Dom Ferdia, helps: excerpts from his journal provide a thoughtful background to the action, and try to build a bridge between the spiritual and the sexual. This crossover novel is a fairy-tale invitation to open a window and feel what it's like to inhabit an alternative human story. It tries to work out an emotional truth with which we one can empathise, maybe even identify, and to open a chink for the general reader on what it really means to be gay. Incidentally, it illustrates how quickly Ireland moves from a pre-modern to a modern society. An imaginative fiction where only real people appear.