MAY 18, 2023 TARPON SPRINGS, FL – The Irishinamerica.org Irish Book Club has selected John Heagney’s debut novel, Traveler, as its May Irish American Featured Book of the Month.
Released March 1 to international acclaim, Traveler is the story of Irish farm boy Neddy McKenna whose world is about to be torn apart and everyone he loves will become a memory.
Neddy is swept from his parents’ small Northern Ireland farm amid the Irish War of Independence to begin a perilous ocean voyage across the Atlantic to Canada as an indentured servant in 1921. Away from family and all things familiar, he is alone in a foreign country of strangers with nothing but his dreams. However, in those recurring dreams, Neddy encounters an enigmatic visitor who calls himself Traveler. Advising, warning and challenging everything the Irish farm boy knows … or thought he knew.
But who is Traveler? Just an apparition? A guide? A guardian angel? Or something Neddy couldn’t begin to imagine as he travels on this life-altering odyssey?
Traveler is based loosely on the experiences of Heagney’s father, Bernard Heagney, as a 16-year-old indentured servant sent alone to Canada in the 1920s. Like more than 100,000 other poor Irish and British children, Bernard was swept up in the infamous British Home Children program. Administered by the British government, Catholic Church as well as other religious sects, the program scattered children of poverty across the globe to lives of servitude, abuse, harsh living conditions and, in some cases, death.
“Traveler explores the possibilities and options in this boy’s life when he’s provided with valuable guidance before situations arise,” Mr. Heagney explains. “Of course, whether or not he listens to advice and heeds the warnings is entirely up to him. But he also must understand that the wrong choices can have sometimes dangerous consequences.”
Widely praised by readers from Australia to Canada, Germany, Ireland, England and the United States, Traveler is available on Amazon.com.
About the author
John Heagney is a first-generation Irish American, whose parents emigrated to the United States from Ireland and Newfoundland via Canada. He is a veteran writer and journalist who has won numerous awards and distinctions for journalistic excellence.
Following his journalism career in Pennsylvania and Florida, he founded John Heagney Public Relations in the Tampa Bay area, representing a national and international slate of clients for the past 40 years. Mr. Heagney also was an adjunct corporate communications trainer, a lecturer at a number of business conferences as well as an instructor teaching public relations writing at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
He resides in Tarpon Springs, Florida, with his wife, Linda, and is tolerated by their two cats, Daltrey and Cami.
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