FOUR novels, including a collection of short stories, all set in Galway during the 1980s and 1990s are this week available as an eBook for the first time.
The books written by Advertiser editor Declan Varley were sell-out successes when they were first launched a quarter of a century ago.
The four books Kittyland, Sure, It Could Happen, The Elephants’ Graveyard and Nightmusic all document a Galway in the era just before the Celtic Tiger.
“I have had a lot of requests every year for copies of the books, but they are all out of print now,” said Declan Varley this week.“So to mark the 25th anniversary of Kittyland, I had all the books scanned and I rewrote them over the summer, so that they are edgier, although they are all still set in that era of Galway before the Celtic Tiger, in the days before smartphones and the Internet.
“Having them available as eBooks preserves them forever, so people can download them anywhere in the world.”
Kittyland is a cult Galway classic coming of age tale of college life and follows a group of students attending Galway RTC (now GMIT ) in the city in the mid to late 1980s.
Sure It Could Happen is a collection of 17 edgy short stories set in the summer of 1992 after the departure of Bishop Eamonn Casey and just before the closure of Digital the following year.
In The Elephants’ Graveyard, a north Galway village is transfixed when an anonymous lottery winner offers to fund the development of a long-delayed community centre. But the gathering of characters who are thrown together by this quirk of fortune reveal old sores that had never healed.
Nightmusic is an urban thriller set in the city featuring a murderous fisherman Malachy Lee, who spices up his mundane life with a love for Mozart, Sherlock Holmes and the odd killing.
The world rights to Declan Varley’s latest novel The Confession of Peadar Gibbons are currently on sale from his agent Paul Feldstein of the Feldstein Agency. Mr Varley is currently working on two novels due for completion in mid 2017.
The eBooks are available for download and can be read on any device from the major online sites such as Amazon, Google, Apple and Barnes & Noble.
