God Coffee is a novel about a couple who are no longer a couple. By way of a Spice Girls song.
It's a novel about relevance. He's living in the City, now on his own, with a degree in literature from University, half taking a stab at running a book shop in the process of being converted away from a computer and gadget shop (to the dismay of the teenage boys who used to frequent the place), spending his days in coffee shops where old men pass the time by playing human chess. So you might pardon him for having difficulty putting his finger on his own relevance in the grand scheme of things. Or even in the littler scheme of things. After all, you can't expect the City to take time out of its busy schedule to pay you special attention, to help you out with -- and out of -- your own personal crises.
Which is why, you can imagine, when mysterious messages begin showing up in the rubbish scattered along the pavement, things start looking... well, different.
Based on messages from the litter, he finds himself increasingly sure that he must do something, seize a direction, though he has no idea what he might do nor in which direction he might do it. While skimming back over the last four years of his life and beyond, he heads out to the seashore like Ulysses late for the boat to Troy where he hopes to find whatever it is we substitute for Helen or war these days in our daily lives.
Time is my first novel, written in Brooklyn and set in a town that is a cross between Worcester, Mass. and Dublin, Ireland.
Time: a novel (also subtitled Jean Buridan is Throwing Things Again) is a novel following the day of two primary characters; Jean Dóthain, an ex-tinsel factory worker, and Helen Day, a clerk at City Hall. From their meeting in the first chapter while waiting to cross the street, the two attempt to dine together – a task which will end up taking them the entire day, and which they appear to be off to finally consummating as the novel ends.
The novel takes up one of Laurence Sterne's favourite themes: dinner. Though Reverend Sterne never had stalkers to blame for not taking any supper. Helen and Jean, on the other hand, have their pick of three separate groups of kidnapper/stalkers, for all of their various reasons, which, in the end, is resolved by Fate. And in between all of this Jean Buridan, a thirteenth century French philosopher, learns some very important lessons about Gravity.
God Coffee, I Miss You is the forthcoming novel from Sane Magazine founder Matthew Hanlon. He is the author of Time: a novel. The style to which these two novels have been compared are Alain de Botton's On Love (US title), Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, and John O' Farrell's The Best A Man Can Get.