Irish international ultra athlete Michael Collins is to publish a new book early next year. The award-winning fiction novelist is also planning a return to competitive international running in 2010.
Michael was a member of the Irish 100km team which finished fifth in the European Championships and 8th in the World Championships in 2007. In additional to his success in ultramarathons, Michael has won a variety of marathon-length races, including the Everest Challenge Marathon, North Pole Marathon, Antarctica Marathon and Redwoods Marathon, California (2:35:46).
A former US athletics scholarship recipient, Michael is highly respected in the world of fiction writing. He has won Irish Book of the Year with 'Keepers of the Truth' and his works have been shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Impac Literary Prize and translated into many languages.
Michael's new book, 'Midnight in a Perfect Life' is set to be released in the UK and Ireland in April 2010. In the interim, he is back training with purpose and will make a welcome return to 100km running next year.
Midnight in a Perfect Life
Karl is a writer, 'standing on the precipice of 40', with his wife Lori, who fears going over the edge without a baby in her arms. As they embark upon IVF treatment, Karl's insecurity, rooted in his troubled childhood and exacerbated by the perilous nature of a writing life, begin to emerge. Karl's only real success as a writer has been as a ghost to the famous crime writer Perry Fennimore - and even then he had managed to lose both the job, and his agent, and to get a lawsuit slapped upon himself in the process. But, in the midst of a financial and existential crisis, brought to a head by the incapacitating expense of fertility treatment, Perry Fennimore re-enters Karl's life. This time Fennimore wants more from Karl than fiction. Creative genius is the result, but at a cost. Can a man detach himself from the world he inhabits without losing himself along the way?
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