NOTRE DAME, Ind. — Corby Books, a division of Corby Publishing, announces the March 26 release of “Of Uncertain Significance,” the new novel by award-winning Irish novelist Dr. Michael Collins of Dowagiac.
Corby Books, primarily a non-fiction publisher, will start its fourth year in publishing with this its first fiction venture.
“There is no way we could pass up the opportunity to publish this remarkable book by Michael Collins,” notes Corby Editorial Director Jim Langford.
“Michael chose Corby because he is an advocate for those trying to have an impact on our culture.”
Describing his life as having always been rooted in “political awareness,” Collins is taking a grassroots approach partnering with Corby, a young publishing house committed to human justice and issues of societal importance.
Confronting the larger uncertainties and inequalities that tend to be ignored by our contemporary convenience culture, Of Uncertain Significance is the product of Collins’ personal questioning of contemporary cultural anxieties and his need to challenge conventions, social and literary.
Positioning the novel as an unwavering rant, threaded to an intentionally disjointed series of political and sociological observations, Collins describes the narrator as “an unapologetic, yet prophetic figure who sees the essential crisis of modernity.”
A “rigorously disquieting novel,” Of Uncertain Significance presents the atomized particles of relationships laid bare, a vivisection of modern aloneness, an uncertain journey in a seemingly godless world.
Of Uncertain Significance takes the reader to the heart of conception, asking questions of the soul. What will be our legacy? How do we want to live and be remembered?
“I wanted to diverge from the crime genre fiction that had garnered me recent successes and venture into a more speculative fiction that raised questions, rather than providing answers,” Collins says of the forthcoming novel, the title of which comes from a cold medical term a surgeon used in referring to Collins’ daughter’s brain tumor.
As he explains, “In those grim early days of my daughter’s illness, I found myself repeating that cold medical term. It had a metaphysical tone to it.  Nothing held significance anymore. I kept wondering what our existence and our time on earth actually means. These questions would define the prevailing theme of the novel, which I started during my daughter’s recovery.”
Collins, whose books have been translated into 22 languages, has garnered numerous literary awards, including two New York Times Notable Book of the Year Awards, along with winning Novel of the Year Awards in Ireland and France and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Book of the Year.
His Midwest based novel, The Keepers of Truth, was shortlisted for The Booker Prize and IMPAC prize.
Collins is also a world-class extreme athlete. At age 46, he is the current captain of the Irish National 100km Team.
He has set a world best time at the Everest Marathon, along with earning a bronze medal at the 2010 World 100k Championships.
A recipient of the Notre Dame Alumni of the Year Award in 2008, Collins currently teaches at Southwestern Michigan College.