[QCRIT] Literary Fiction – Jimmy & Me (70k words) -Third Attempt

Thanks to everyone who responded to my previous attempt. Here I go again!

I am seeking representation for JIMMY & ME, a 70,000-word literary fiction novel set-in present-day Dublin. Combining literary suspense with an exploration of shame, class, and the weight of silence, it will appeal to readers of Colin Walsh’s Kala and Megan Nolan's Ordinary Human Failings.

Seven years after her brother Jimmy disappears, thirty-one-year-old Tara Carroll returns to Dublin from New York when a journalist researching missing men asks to feature his case. With the seven-year mark—the point at which Jimmy can legally be declared dead—approaching, Tara wants answers that will allow her family to let him go. While her father and her brother Derek remain suspended in hope, Tara is certain Jimmy is dead. Derek’s reluctance to speak with the journalist, or accept that Jimmy’s not coming home, makes it difficult for Tara to get to the truth.

Tara is also carrying a secret: months before Jimmy vanished, Jimmy was responsible for a fatal hit-and-run. To protect her family, Tara has kept this knowledge hidden. Reconnecting with Rob, her former partner and the only other person who knows about the accident, forces Tara to revisit the choices she made after Jimmy’s disappearance—and the life she left behind. But Rob has his own secrets, and his suspicion that his late father played a role in Jimmy’s disappearance complicates Tara’s attempts to find out what happened to her brother.

JIMMY & ME examines emigration, fractured families, and evolving ideas of masculinity, asking what happens when silence becomes a way of surviving. As Tara becomes consumed by the search, she finds herself drifting further from her husband and the carefully constructed life she has built in New York. Uncovering the truth about Jimmy means confronting the reality she has spent seven years trying to outrun.