PUSH ME AWAY

About the Book

‘You have the power to make me the happiest man in the world. You can also make me the saddest person who ever lived. In that sense, I’ve set you up amongst the Gods.’ January 28th 2012, his 44th birthday. John Eaglewood goes mysteriously missing. Left behind are his wife, Jessica and the on-off affair shared with one Julia Langley, a woman almost half his age. Crowned in events leading to Eaglewood’s sudden disappearance and set in both the 19th and 21st centuries, via an intricate mesh of journal entries, communications and other fragments, gradually unfolds a time bending story of obsession and betrayal. But what falls between the memoirs of a troubled Branwell Brontë and latterly, the equally turbulent, murky life of a man vanished without trace for five years? Over one and a half centuries awaiting completion, ‘Push Me Away’ is the only novel by Branwell, much maligned brother of the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily & Anne. Proof, if needed, that the greatest magician in the universe is time.

About the Author

Patrick Branwell Brontë was born 26th June 1817. The fourth and only son of the six Brontë children, as such it was always intended that of the family he should be encouraged in his chosen career of writer and artist. But sadly, it wasn’t to be. After the early deaths of his mother and elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth, his life, already haunted by bereavement and disease would be further plagued by depression, alcoholism and numerous occupational set backs.

Ironically, where their fading brother was destined to go unpublished, under the assumed name Bell, (Currer, Charlotte; Ellis, Emily; and Acton, Anne) behind their brother’s back, secretly flourished the prestigious talents of his three surviving sisters. The likes of ‘Jane Eyre’ prospering amongst volumes of Branwell’s confused and fragmentary literary efforts set in his imaginary world of ‘Angria’ and starring his swashbuckling alter-ego ‘Northangerland’. (Pictured above)

For all that, of what the rest of his family were entirely unaware, was the dawn of Branwell’s foremost brainchild; a vivid account of his own disheartening love story. A book that in order to see completed, in the very last days of his life, he literally hurled across the centuries.

Branwell Brontë lived at the Parsonage, in Haworth Village, West Yorkshire. He died aged 31 in September 1848. Not until 2015 would time finally see published this, his first and part-posthumous novel, ‘Push Me Away’.