Beyond the Horizon

by Eoin Lane

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Pub Date Jun 23 2020 | Archive Date Aug 10 2020

Blackstone Publishing

General Fiction (Adult) | Literary Fiction

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Description

She points the lens of the camera. The artist turns his head slightly. The light catches his brow and his silver-white hair. She snaps. He is lit like a Vermeer.

Ireland. County Wicklow, 1951. A father and son go swimming in the sea. The waves crash. The wind rises. Only one comes back—Colin, aged six. His mother, Eileen, runs to seek help, but this is a tragedy that will haunt them forever. Colin won’t speak a word. He is mute and struggling to cope. But Eileen can see he has a talent for painting. She shows him his father’s artwork and gives him a print of a Paul Henry landscape, and slowly, with her encouragement, he begins to follow his dream.

Years later on Inishbofin island off the west coast of Ireland, out walking with his dog on the sand, Colin meets Laura, a young woman on holiday, and a tentative friendship starts to develop. Gradually his past comes to life in a story filled with love and frustration, loss and betrayal, but above all with the passion he has held through his life for the light in the sea and the sky and his search for that distant, elusive shore where the sky sweeps down to the water.

One man. The sea. One painting.

She points the lens of the camera. The artist turns his head slightly. The light catches his brow and his silver-white hair. She snaps. He is lit like a Vermeer.

Ireland. County Wicklow, 1951. A...

Advance Praise

“Eoin Lane has crafted an intensely visual novel, capturing a play of light and shadow, and the substance of a life lived on the seam between brightness and grief.”

-Neil Hegarty, author of The Jewel

“Eoin Lane uses words like brush strokes as he tells Colin’s story, describing in a painterly way how storm clouds gather on his horizon, buffeting him and those around him. Driven by his creativity he learns cope with loss, love, and friendship, seeking shafts of sun to light his canvas.”

-Sarah Maine, author of The House between Tides

“With graceful, assured prose Lane crafts a moving mediation on trauma, loss, and the redemptive power of art.”

-Robert Haller, author of Another Life

“Eoin Lane’s Beyond the Horizon is a book for anyone who loves Ireland, loves the sea, and loves art—particularly, the painter’s dangerous romance, or passionate duel, with canvas and paint. Lane’s deep understanding of this process, both its tragedies and its triumphs, animates every page, every word.”

-Daniel Hecht, bestselling author of On Brassard’s Farm

“Having known Eoin back when we both started out as painters many years ago, I found Beyond the Horizon interesting to have such a formative experience seen through his eyes. A moving, sensitive first novel that deals with love, loss, and the journey of an Irish artist across the topography of an evolving cultural and personal landscape.”

-Gavin Lavelle, Irish artist and owner of the Lavelle Art Gallery

“I was transported rapidly into the world of Colin Larkin to embark on a journey of tragedy, creativity, love, and loss in an emotion-filled story. Lane has a gift for poetic visual storytelling that reels you in and helps you combine images with text to heighten the experience and ultimately connect the reader to all the themes and threads throughout.”

-Elsie Nolan, Artist

“Eoin Lane has crafted an intensely visual novel, capturing a play of light and shadow, and the substance of a life lived on the seam between brightness and grief.”

-Neil Hegarty, author of The...