Bücher von Patrick Moran

Forty Voices Strong is a robust anthology of poetry by contemporary Scottish poets. In it are unflinching portraits of people whose lives are full of laughter and suffering, friendship and loss, pride and determination. Although the style and subject matter of the poems vary greatly, in general they are notable for the compassion, wisdom, and humor they express.

Norma Christianstead is the first person raised from conception to adulthood in zero gravity. The year is 2200. She is a temporal savant. The goal is to determine how micro-gravity interacts with physical, intellectual, social and psychological development. Fifteen years later a CRISPR-spawned plague is overtaking Earth. Norma learns there is another goal to the experiment: to respond to the divinations of a secret artifact-a beacon-of an ancient civilization that vacated the Tharsian region of Mars a billion years earlier when the planet's seas evaporated. The response to the beacon demands nothing less than an epigenetic evolutionary alteration in Norma, for theTharsian genomic code is genophotonic: a hybrid consisting of physical and photonic parts. In this, Patrick Moran's fourteenth novel, the author comes to grips with how and why gravity and perception are related. In Zero Gravity Girl he weds the two in a tale that redefines the meaning of love and life, time and space.

August 1945: A Victory Train bound from Chicago rumbles through the Sierra Nevada stuffed with soldiers celebrating the end of WWII. One is Daniel Rose, scion of a legendary movie studio. Moral turpitude has ended Daniel's service to his country. In L.A. Daniel meets Cutter, a man fleeing from military service guarding a uranium mine. Their dream is to put the military behind them. A year later they purchase a "coffee-pot" radio station. It is an instant success. They buy a retreat they call Mystic Mountain. But their success brings trouble, and they soon discover a mysterious financial arrangement funded with money smuggled out of Europe in 1939 is threatening to ruin everything they've achieved. The two learn that the fund is a scheme to make the world safe for atomic weaponry, and that their Place of Promise has been bought by the same currency of murder, duplicity, innocence, generosity and greed that made post-war America so prosperous.

Rhianna's lifeless body lies splayed atop a salt spire on the south shore of Mono Lake. A sapling oak rises from inside the young woman's abdomen. Murder by tree hugger? Or something more complicated? On the eve of his arrest, the confessed killer walks up to an aspen tree and disappears into it. Heed is his name. A genetic interloper between flora and fauna. A shape shifter. Thus begins the mystery confronting Rhianna's ex-husband Marlyn, a transgender man, to uncover how a murderer could take the life of his beloved, and how he can bring himself to rationalize those same choices as his own.

Parker buries his loyal yellow Labrador retriever in a century-old and long-neglected pet cemetery in the Wine Country of Northern California, only to find that the graveyard itself is scheduled to be plowed under to make room for an upscale Pinot Noir vineyard. Nearing the end of his own life, Parker vows to keep vigil over his beloved companion until he himself dies or the owners relent. His vow to stay beside his pet until she can rest in peace attracts cohorts from near and far. It is their combined devotion that is the fulcrum upon which this story of one man's undying love for his best friend balances.

A sports odyssey about a planet whose water-borne, raft-dwelling peoples must compete in globe-girding rowing regattas in order to win the right to reproduce. Failure to win means facing the "Long Death" of extinction. But more than telling of a fight for survival, The Hard'n-Back tells a love story whose timeless dimensions of devotion and sacrifice reach beyond the boundaries of survival itself.

Set in Venice and Asia Minor, Swimming In Stone is the sequel to That Which Bends. It tells the tale of Dusty Rhodes after she and her lover, Bodie Bloom, have won forty million euros in the Italian Lottery, only to see Bodie die shortly afterwards. Heartbroken but rich beyond her wildest imaginings, Dusty embarks on a voyage of hope with Bodie's estranged family in order to split Bodie's portion of the winnings in accordance with his last wishes. In the end Dusty and Bodie's family learn the truth that real fortune is measured not in the currency of exchange but in the currency of hope from which redemption may be wrung.

The time is late-21st Century. Tali Rosen is an accomplished net-stretcher for Nacho-Net, headquartered in Havana. Tali's life begins to unravel when her Cuban fiancée cheats on her. At the same time, Tali's Aunt falls into a coma after an automobile accident, and Tali retreats home to Northern California. There she finds she can communicate with her comatose aunt through what Tali will learn is called the tsunami: a potent fusion of organic, electronic and spiritual networks made possible by the creation of DnetA. Operating outside the confines of time and space, the tsunami enables Tali to venture back and forth across the boundary regions between life and death. Swept up by this tidal wave, she learns that the tsunami itself is an artificial recreation of the bardos of Tibetan Buddhism, and is a marketing experiment that has gone horribly wrong. In the end Tali must risk everything to undo the damage the tsunami has wrought to the border region separating life and death.

Water is a reflection of the eternal that adds the face of eternity to glass. We recognize this as beauty. It does this in the same way that water shapes the soul of man, by inhibiting the formation of the things that prevent crystallization. In man, those things that prevent the crystallization of the soul are vanity and hubris. Venetians wear masks to remind themselves of this connection to water and to keep them from going insane in the knowledge of what is beneath the reflections -Chicken Johnny- Master Muranese GlassblowerIn this quirky new novel that reflects on the nature of fortune, an expatriate American businesswoman adrift in the world, and a San Francisco restauranteur on a final journey look beneath their reflections in the timeless waters of Venice to find that which bends the world is love.