Gerard Ronan Knihy

Twelve-year-old Rufus has been disqualified from a National Short Story competition. The judges have accused him of copying the story of a boy who won the competition twelve years earlier. But Rufus's story was not a work of fiction. It was a true account of his encounters with a mysterious old man who spoke in riddles - a man who had taken to hanging about the Martello Tower in Donabate the previous summer. But how could that be? How could two boys have shared an identical experience twelve years apart? And why did they both choose to write about it? And why, when the two eventually meet, will the encounter change both of their lives forever?

Sophia Parnell-Evans (1780-1853) ran a large and successful farming enterprise at at time when few women had done so. She met two Queens, the ex-wife of Napoleon and knew the radical feminist Margaret Mount Cashel. A friend of both the Darwin and Condorcet families, she was daughter and sister to three of the most prominent Irish politicians of her day, and wife to another. A radical thinker in her own right, Sophia founded two primary schools in Donabate and helped in no small way to mitigate the effects of the Great Famine in her locality. The memorial round tower she built in memory of her devoted husband, the MP George Evans, revived a tradition of tower building that had lain dormant for seven centuries. As the great aunt of Charles Stewart Parnell, she even made it into the pages of Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" as the practical joker "greataunt Sophy".