Ralph Josiah Bardsley
Books
Brothers – 2015 IndieFab Book of the Year Award Winner
Available in stores and online now!
At twenty-three, Jamus Cork’s plans are simple—graduate college, stay in New York City, and write. But those plans change when his parents are suddenly killed and he finds himself the guardian of his little brother, Nick. Jamus ends up back in the Boston neighborhood where he grew up, with a crying toddler on his knee and the challenge of building a new life for himself and the boy. Jamus somehow finds a way to navigate the ups and downs of single parenting, but over a decade of raising Nick, Jamus never truly overcomes his struggles with loneliness and the guilt he feels as the sole survivor of the crash that killed his parents. That changes when he meets bookishly handsome Sean Malloy. There’s a spark between the two men, but both must face down their own private demons to find love in the Irish enclave of South Boston.
My first book, Brothers, explores the dynamics between two sets of Irish American brothers from South Boston. Their lives meet in unexpected ways and, as they grow together they learn about bravery, love and being comfortable in their own skins.
Brothers is on sale now in bookstores, from Bold Strokes Books, and on Amazon.
The Photographer's Truth - Available in Stores July 12, 2016
Paris has a luster to it that is all its own – a glamour that pulls people together and pushes them apart in waves of love and luck that are quite unlike the natural properties of any other city on Earth. One cannot possibly spend any substantial length of time there and remain unaffected by those forces of nature – they are just there, beyond our control and beyond our understanding. The city’s plan for each of us is as much a mystery as the city itself, and to ask why we feel the way we do in Paris might as well be to ask why the night sky there is such a rich shade of purple.
Paris is exactly where Ian Baines, a middle-aged tech geek from Silicon Valley, finds himself when he goes on assignment to help a French fashion brand install a new software platform. While there, he meets a once famous photographer who gave up on his art for some reason that nobody quite understands. Ian's curiousity is his undoing when he finds he can't let go of trying to find out what the photographer's secret is.
The world of Brothers...
Writing Brothers was not too much of a stretch for me. It is fiction - there isn't a single character that is based on a specific person in my life. But the abundance of love and the bits of conflict in the book come from the fabric of my world growing up in an Irish-American family. My mother always told my brother and me that there is nothing more important in your life - nor will there ever be anything more important - than your brother. Your job is to look after each other. Well, there were only two of us, and that made it relatively easy - she has seven brothers (now that's a lot of responsibility).
The novel is set in a part of Boston that I lived in only briefly - South Boston. But my mother's family had originally lived there when they first came to Massachusetts. The ten years I lived in Boston was mostly in the South End - which turned out to be another key setting in the book. As I wrote Brothers, I spent a lot of time reliving my experiences in Boston, and it always brought a smile to my face. It's such a great city with a rich history and a beautiful soul.
