My debut novel, The Starlight Line, has just been published by Red Giant Books. This has been in the works for a while now, but, after some unexpected delays, the book is finally out and itching to be read.

Part barroom Beat romance, part cubist caper, part speculative literary critique, The Starlight Line is sure to please. So get ye to your favorite local bookstore and order up some copies for you and your friends. (Also available from usual online suspects: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s.)

Some Advance Praise for The Starlight Line:

With echoes of Kerouac, Lowry, and Bukowski, Matt Marshall delivers a penetrating, but oddly reassuring, look into the souls of the drifters, drinkers and all the rest of us who just don’t fit in.

—Larry Kirwan, author of A History of Irish Music, Rockin’ the Bronx and Liverpool Fantasy, and former leader of Irish-American rock band Black 47

Matt Marshall’s novel, The Starlight Line, is a fascinating, complex, layer-cake of a book. The frame narration is semi-autobiographical; the narrator is a frustrated writer from Cleveland, searching for inspiration. The other layers interpenetrate and enrich the frame story: Jack London’s drug-addled wanderings; Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico; a writer’s search for Jack Kerouac’s mysterious muse, Esperanza Villanueva. Marshall’s skillful technique allows him to experiment with a variety of narrative voices that work like various instruments in a symphony. The voices add texture and depth to the story. In effect, Marshall produces a novel that is about the process of fiction writing itself.

—Philip J. Skerry, author of Dark Energy: Hitchcock’s Absolute Camera and the Physics of Cinematic Spacetime and Psycho in the Shower: The History of Cinema’s Most Famous Scene