Yellow Sun Press author
Imogen
Tully
Imogen Tully hunts for classics with a story worth telling again, whether the book was crowned by critics, passed over by nearly everyone, or famous mostly for what it got wrong. Then she drops its characters into the present day and lets them loose.
She keeps the heart of each original and plays with everything else, sometimes even the ending. Her retellings are lively and mischievous, written by someone who loves the source enough to take liberties with it.
She lives in London, a city that keeps rebuilding itself on top of its own history, and she borrows freely from the habit.
Meet her debut
The debut
Love and Other Submerged Objects
A Novel
Amanda McKittrick Ros’s Delina Delaney (1898) is famous as one of the worst novels in English. The Inklings held contests to read her prose aloud without laughing. Love and Other Submerged Objects is a modern retelling of it, a romantic comedy set on the wild Donegal coast, and this time you are meant to laugh.
Dr. Gifford Rathbourne-Cave has four days, one bone and one signature to get. He has driven to Ballybeg with the last missing piece of the Ballybeg Elk, an eleven-thousand-year-old giant deer that has stood incomplete in the ballroom of his family’s crumbling castle for more than a century. On Sunday afternoon the trustees of the National Museum arrive from Dublin and his mother signs the collection over to the nation. After that he goes back to Dublin and the sensible woman he is going to marry.
Then Delina Delaney reverses a quad bike down the slip.
Before the morning is out, the museum’s flight case is drifting out to sea in her dinghy, Gifford is in the Atlantic, and a lobster has hold of his finger. Delina grows the best mussels on the coast and has nowhere to purify them, and she has no time for a man in a Dublin coat. Still, she knows every dry seam of the bog, every soul in the parish and every way the week can go wrong.
The week finds all of them. There is a mix-up over a matching case, an emu with a fondness for handles, a wolfhound with a gift for burial, a regatta ball with a treacherous zip and a night in a Garda cell. A rival bidder turns up with four million euro for the castle, and with an offer to Delina of the one building on the harbour she has wanted for thirteen years.
This is a warm, sea-soaked comedy of mussels, manners and second chances, about two people who are each very good at holding on and are about to learn when to let go.
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