Lettertec was delighted to print, Honeysuckle to Handcuffs, written by Delia O’Callaghan. In 2012 Delia was one of the finalists in the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair competition.
In 2008, while living in Boston, U.S.A. Delia joined a creative writers’ workshop at the Boston Centre for Adult Education. Taking on board the expert’s advice to write about what she knew, Delia started a novel about an Irish girl living and working illegally in Boston.
The following year, Delia, took a trip back to Ireland, in a disastrous twist of faith which turned her life upside down – she found herself locked up in the San Diego Correctional Facility. Ironically, although Delia’s worst nightmare came to fruition, she now had the new material she desperately needed and Honeysuckle to Handcuffs was born.
When Boston-based Irishwoman Delia O’Callaghan meets Frank, she can’t believe her luck…
He’s everything any girl could wish for; rich, charming, handsome and fun. Whisked up into a world of ritzy restaurants and jet set living, it looks like all of Delia’s dreams are set to come true – that is, until US customs catch wind of Delia’s lack of a Green Card when she tries to return to the States after a trip home to Ireland for her sister’s wedding. Frank returns to Boston without Delia, leaving her stranded in Ireland with a big red ‘DENIED ENTRY’ stamp in her passport.
Determined to get back to the love of her life, Delia devises a hare-brained scheme: if she can’t get into America a legitimate way, then she’ll do what hundreds of thousands of people do each year: she’ll sneak-in through the Mexican border. What’s the worst that could happen… right? She asks herself, half-heartedly. But when the plan goes wrong. So wrong, in fact that Delia finds herself locked up in the San Diego Correctional Facility with a foul-mouthed, religious, drug-trafficking, yet protective, lesbian cellmate, Teresa. Not to mention Officer Lopez: the six-foot-two prison guard, identifiable as a woman only through her lack of an Adam’s apple. How is Delia going to cope? And will there be a happy ever after?
Honeysuckle to Handcuffs is the hilarious, fish-out-of water true story of one woman’s journey who discovers that over the course of nearly a month in jail and a series of disastrous but comical events that there might be more to life than Rolexes, fancy cocktails and fine dining.
The book is to be launched on the 8th of October by Brent Pope in the Bodega, Cork at 7pm.
