A Word from the Author

Welcome and thanks for visiting RobertGollagher.com.

I am a novelist based in Brisbane, Australia. On this site you will find my first three novels written between 1995 and 1999. You are welcome to read them online or to download them for your personal, non-commercial use.

It's great to see how many readers have accessed these books since the site first went live in 2002. Over the past twelve months this website has received an average of more than 1,200 visits per month. A quick Google search for "Robert Gollagher" lists dozens of referring sites (especially literary catalogues, recommended reading lists and blogs). The novels have also been available from the National Library of Australia since 2006.

If you enjoy these novels you might be pleased to hear that I have begun work on a fourth novel. Since I finished my third novel ten years ago, and I have done a lot of living between then and now, I expect the current novel to show greater maturity. Perhaps I will have finally come of age as a writer, which I suppose is my goal in writing again. The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke had this to say about how to write good poetry: "You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines." Certainly my immaturity as a writer shows in my first three novels but as Rilke points out that is normal and to be expected. It is okay to be a beginner. And it is okay not to be a beginner any more.

The fourth novel is going to be about something which has deeply troubled me over the past decade, especially as I watched international events. It will concern the matter of truth and the value of truth. It seems there is now a belief endemic in our civilisation that there is no practical difference between a good lie, well told, and the truth. This hypnotic, intoxicating, seductive belief has been responsible for wars, for all manner of violence, for environmental disasters, for corporate corruption and for much misery in dysfunctional families. It seems at every level, from the family to international politics, that a lie has taken hold: the lie is that the truth does not matter and that a good enough lie is practically speaking as good as the truth. The danger for civilisation is that this is utterly, completely false. A good lie is not practically speaking as good as the truth. In the long run it is much, much worse. Over time such lies actually come to control us. The lie takes on a life of its own and it spreads. We become unwitting accomplices to the lie. We become unable to even see the lie. We believe the lie and the truth are one and the same. And disaster, small or large, is the result. The working title of the novel is A Perfect Lie and it will explore these issues. I hope to complete the novel in 2010.

And what about my previous novels?

I finished The Colour of Sunday Afternoons in 1998 after working on it sporadically for three and a half years, delayed by the challenges of daily life and several bouts of illness. I am embarrassed now by how amateurish the writing is but nevertheless readers have told me they really enjoyed the book and found its little message inspirational. And after all I must remain grateful to the fictitious character, Shamus Maguinty. He really did 'appear' to me one day in 1995 while sitting in the coffee shop in Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth, Western Australia. At the time I was working as a pharmaceutical sales rep and I was a very stressed workaholic. I asked myself, If I had a guardian angel what would he look like and what would he have to say about the way I'm living my life? And so Shamus popped into my imagination, floated beside my table and talked some sense into me. It was the start of my journey as a novelist. That year I quit my job and devoted the next five years to writing three novels while working part-time. So in a way Shamus Maguinty, bogus leprechaun and guardian angel, is responsible for all of this.

By early 1999 when I finished my second book, Green Dream, I had grown considerably as a writer. For a start it only took me seven months to complete the novel, which by coincidence was exactly the same time it would take me to finish The Street Angel later that year. My ability to tell a story, hopefully about a subject which was important and which might actually matter to the reader, had improved greatly. Several readers told me they were genuinely moved to tears by Green Dream, which is exactly what a book of its type should do. So I knew I was at least heading in the right direction as a writer. Unfortunately real life was to get in the way again and it would not be until 2009 that work on my next novel began.

None of these books have yet been professionally edited and all contain too many commas, a few typos and other oversights which a good editor would remove. If any of the books are ever published through conventional channels that task would then finally be carried out. I might even be inclined to revise the novels one day, in the light of my now greater experience as a writer, but for now I have chosen instead to focus on the future. There are new, better books to be written ahead.

In the meantime I hope you enjoy reading these three novels.

Robert Gollagher
July 2009
Brisbane