TARPON SPRINGS, FL – John Heagney, creator of the internationally acclaimed historic novel, Traveler, is scheduled to seem Saturday on BBC Radio’s Your Place and Mine program to debate the ebook and his journey to writing it.
Primarily based partially on the experiences of his father as a teenaged indentured servant in Canada, Traveler is the story of younger Neddy McKenna who’s swept alone from his household’s small farm in northern Eire to a lifetime of indenture an ocean away in Ontario of the Nineteen Twenties.
Neddy takes with him only a battered suitcase and his goals. However in these goals, he encounters time and again a mysterious stranger calling himself Traveler who guides, warns and challenges every little thing the farm boy is aware of or thinks he knew. However who’s Traveler? An apparition? A guardian angel or one thing Neddy couldn’t probably think about?
Neddy, like Heagney’s father, is only one of greater than 100,000 poor Irish and British youngsters ensnared in what grew to become often known as the notorious British Residence Kids program. For almost 80 years, the British authorities, Catholic Church and greater than 50 different non secular and secular organizations scattered youngsters of poverty as free itinerant labor to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa with the false promise of a greater life and limitless alternatives.
In actuality, these youngsters have been thought of sub-human by many of their host international locations and have been starved, overwhelmed, raped and compelled to reside in deplorable circumstances. Many ran away, dedicated suicide, have been murdered or just forgotten to demise.
Each the British and Australian governments have issued formal apologies to these youngsters and households affected by the Residence Kids scheme, because it was referred to as.
Practically 40 years after Bernard Heagney died in Florida, John Heagney uncovered his father’s never-revealed secret of indenture whereas researching household historical past on-line, beginning with the ship that introduced his father to Canada.
Traveler has acquired virtually common reward from readers throughout the globe and has been referred to as “fascinating” by Highland Radio in Northern Eire. It’s an Irish In America Guide of the Month Membership choice, and has been praised by Irishphiladelpia.com as having “a cinematic really feel to it: It’s action-packed and filled with vividly drawn characters.”
Traveler is obtainable on Amazon as an book and paperback. The URL within the U.S. is: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BW2QM63S/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0..