Rosanna Sweeney defies her father's deathbed order that she never go to Italy. She and her troubled daughter journey to Calabria, where they find romance, one another, and that there are some things that are worse than the Mafia.
I am the author of four novels: 36C, Slings and Arrows, Hardhead, and The Speed of Dark. My short stories have won awards from Writer's Digest and the National Writers Club, twice have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and have appeared in print and online. My story The Clambake was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2002. The Clambake and a number of other short stories of mine are available in audio version, singly and in anthologies at Sniplts.com, a fun site.
I practiced law for ten years, was a Features Editor for Strictly Scarsdale and a reporter for The Scarsdale Inquirer. I am a Founder of the award-winning Rose & Thorn Literary E-Zine (http://www.theroseandthornjournal.com) which was named one of Writer's Digest's top five 'Internet Envy' fiction publications for 2002, and one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers in 2004. I love to travel and also love spending time on the shore at Bradely Beach.
My novel The Speed of Dark should be available for Kindle and ebooks in the spring/summer. Here are the author blurbs on the back cover of The Speed of Dark:
Barbara Quinn's novel The Speed of Dark is a fascinating and imaginative story, blending the real with the fantastic, giving us characters we can know and root for. Her writing is wise and magical, filled with wit, passion and honesty. -Noel Hynd, author of Ghosts and Cemetery of Angels
I'm always on the lookout for a good new author and Barbara Quinn fits that description to a "T." I loved The Speed of Dark, from the wonderfully realized setting to the characters and their complicated, but timeless, relationships with each other. Quinn has also done a terrific job in bringing to life what it was like growing up in the early part of the sixties. I was a teenager at that time and a lot of what she writes about is eerily familiar-either from my own life, or the people I knew at the time.-Charles de Lint, author of Someplace to be Flying, Forests of the Heart,Seven Wild Sisters, The Onion Girl
By turns lyrical and grittily realistic, The Speed of Dark brings its own vision to the Stephen King territory of small town life in the sixties. In a novel rich with period detail, Barbara Quinn effectively captures the sense of the numinous that pervades everyday life.-Eileen Kernaghan, author of The Snow Queen, Songs from the Drowned Lands, and The Sarsen Witch
