The dork of Cork

Frank Bois is forty-three years old and forty-three inches tall, but his yearnings are as wide and deep as the night sky he contemplates from his rooftop in Cork, Ireland. THE DORK OF CORK is his story, a tale that will capture your emotions from its provocative opening line to its surprising ending. And only Chet Raymo, the naturalist and born poet who wrote 365 Starry Nights and The Soul of Night, could have created such an extraordinary and appealing hero, whose solace against loneliness is the beauty of the stars. In 1945 a sixteen-year-old French girl is smuggled aboard the troopship California by American GI's returning home from war. Her name is Bernadette, and she rewards her co-conspirators with sexual favors. She is discovered by ship's officers and put ashore at Cork Harbor, where she finds herself pregnant, penniless, and alone. Her baby, Frank, is born a dwarf.

Now, years later, Frank is about to become a literary celebrity, as the author of a personal memoir that is also a meditation on beauty and brokenness, love and unaccountable hurt. His move from the dark isolation of his deformity into the glare of public acclaim is colored by his poignant past as a lonely boy who marks the days of his growing up with lunar eclipses, meteor showers, and the visitations of comets. As his story unfolds, we discover the secrets of Bernadette's tragic childhood in Nazi-occupied France; her erotic and self-destructive relationships with the three men who were smitten by her beauty, and who in turn shaped her son's life; young Frank's enduring passion for a woman he believes to be as unreachable as the stars; and the green, misty essence of Ireland itself, where miracles just might be possible.

In this mesmerizing novel, Chet Raymo creates characters so out of the ordinary they take their place among the most memorable fictional creations. In his protagonist Frank Bois, he joins a delicate heart with a profound intelligence to show us the paradoxes and the promises of being a thinking, feeling human on the journey we all share - the search for love and meaning here on Earth, and, perhaps, out there among the stars.