DOWNEY
WINE, MEN & MOZART
In Vienna 1968 three vivacious students: Manhattanite June, English Liz
and Irish Moira, became best friends while studying languages, arts, business,
photography and majoring in wine, men, and dance. They did it all: degrees,
careers, success, marriage, kids, divorce, heartbreak, world travel.
It’s now 2008.
The Three live in London and have changed from wild sparks to dead old
batteries. Moira the globetrotting professional has Boreout/Burnout, lives like a
recluse and also suffers from CRX (Can’t Remember Sex). Liz with a brain as
honed as Newton’s, produces TV programmes that would bore a baby baboon
while her French husband bonks a no brain blondie half her age. June, the
designer/real estate virtuoso is the unmerriest widow whining about Martin, the
Mozart fanatic, who tragically died 10 years earlier. She chats to his ashes
which reside in mini-Mozart chocolate boxes all over her home.
Then the Bigtime Scheiẞe hits all their fans.
June’s son Robert gives The Three a holiday reunion in Vienna. They
can sing arias for his beloved Dad around Mozart's grave followed by an all-
night party in Café Antoandrezi where they all hung out during their student
years.
The Three can’t refuse his thoughtful gift and return like women going to
the guillotine to the city they swore for different reasons never to set foot in
again.
Can their city of wine, men, love, laughter & Mozart rekindle their fires?
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DIARIES OF A CULTURED CAT
Lucia, the cultured kitty of Kerry, is torn from her rural idyll of lazy days and nights of poetry and story telling beneath the stars to become London’s fluffiest illegal immigrant. Smuggled via ferry and rucksack by her new owners’ children, this is the story of how Lucia the muse of Kerry, becomes Lucia, the latch key Wimbledon wanderer. Hooking up with London’s other lost feline souls she recounts their urban adventures along with her own. To cope with her ex-pat pain, Lucia starts a journal documenting the tangled lives of her new owners’ stress-fuelled urban lifestyles and their attempts to deal with the daily round of love, loss, betrayal, revenge and ... microwave dinners. Not to mention the mad Irish aunts, Olga the designer spy, Bruiser the alcoholic pub cat, Amy the loony BBC arts producer, the Czech Secret Police and the lost vineyards. You know. The usual!!
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MANHATTAN MEETS MINNESOTA
In 80’s Manhattan locals joked it would be easier to find your long lost dime in Grand Central Station than meet your soul mate. Michelle (33) and Tommy (22) are NOT panting for a soul mate.
Michelle has it all: booming antique business; vast penthouse; an adoring dog and suave Phillip, her dating mate. She’s done and seen it all. She compares love and romance to radioactive gas. She’s had enough of both, thank you. Until young Tommy strolls into her store one May morning. ‘And of all the stores in all of New York it had to be hers’, to quote her best friend Gail.
Tommy, newly arrived from Minnesota, is a gifted toy inventor who can make little pigs fly and turkeys hop. He lives in a Chelsea dump with overabundant animal life lurking in the walls, survives on take-outs from the Non Chirping Chicken while his pal Russ sells his toys on the sidewalks of Manhattan.
Michelle and Tommy have nothing in common except love. Even Shakespeare emphasized that one cannot live by love alone. Can Michelle and Tommy?
Michelle and Tommy’s witty love story spans four seasons from the beginning
of spring to the end of winter.
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PARIS IS THE PITS (When you’re down to your last Irish sausage)
SEQUEL TO NELLIE
Desperate to play Juliet before she’s too old Nellie (18) leaves the rural wilds of Ireland and heads for Paris. The City of Light will recognize her acting talent and transform her life into one of romance and glamour. Helas! She’s in for a hell of a shock on all fronts.
Her tiny apartment is shabbier than the dog's kennel at home. Her loser artistic friends include Hansi whose art resembles an explosion in a fertilizer factory, writer Paul, the 80’s non-answer to Hemingway and Diana the fencing fanatic. Her French lover goes awol and she's playing an understudy corpse instead of Shakespeare's Juliet. Paris pounds her dreams to a pulp. But Nellie is staying put until that City of Love delivers the goods!
This witty novel is an Irish take on the Bohemian/Parisian/Montmartre lifestyle myth. It weaves in ironic subplots. When her Grandad and step-granny visit they have more fun and success in the city of love than all the creatives combined ... and decide to linger.
Adapted as a feature film this received funding from the Irish Film Fund.
Plus a dazzling review from French Radio London
Listen to the interview on the site of the French
Radio London (in french): Open on new tab
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NELLIE
It's the scorching Irish Summer of 1981. In the seaside Kerry village of Dun-mo-Croi love dreams are turning into many-splendoured nightmares. Nellie falls in love with Danny. Her Grandad falls for Belinda, a visiting elderly British painter. One of these love affairs is truly doomed.
Booklist, the American Library Association awarded this novel Best Fiction of the Year in 1985.
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Love, Turf & Elvis
The magic of the Emerald Isle is lauded in song and verse. The narrator, young Roisin wants to know where that magic is lurking in the green, soggy fields she, brother Ned, sisters Philly and Mairead are growing up in. They’re gasping for something exciting to happen – preferably Elvis dropping in for a dance.
Love, Turf & Elvis is a funny poignant memoir of 4 siblings battering the boredom of the endless fresh air and the wild Irish countryside in their quest for excitement in 50’s Abbeyfeale, Co. Limerick.
This optimistic story of a country childhood is set in a now vanished Ireland when the back roads were alive to the sound of birdsong and not battalions of 4 X 4 knocking the rare cyclist into the ditch. It is based on a real family (Eileen & Andrew Downey’s) growing up in the old parochial house christened Hillside – even though there wasn’t a hill for miles.
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LONDON SAVES ME
Rat poison, Warfarin, helps post stroke. But in this upbeat stroke recovery book, the city of London is another vital healing ingredient.
At 54 Brigitte Downey, novelist and seasoned TV professional is preparing to head off to Dubai to do a programme on camel racing and camel surrogacy. Instead she wakes up in Charing Cross Hospital the victim of a stroke. They save her life. But her career, health and most of her hair goes down the spout. Life post stroke is grim and slow. Until she remembers. Working on planet TV the motto always was: ‘IF THERE’S A PROBLEM – JUST SOLVE IT!’ In normal parlance this means if Mary won’t do the interview, then hassle Joseph, Gabriel or one of the goats who witnessed the Birth to go on camera.
She finds the solution. LONDON! A pot of tea in the V&A; the swans in Kew Gardens; recitals in Wren Churches; Shakespeare in The Globe. She sits and writes in all these amazing places. 'LONDON SAVES ME' is her thanks to the wonderful medics at Charing Cross Hospital and the inspirational city that saved her from Daisyland and propelled her back to life.
CHEERS LONDON! THANK YOU!
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