Author Name
Author Name
LITERARY, FILM & TV AGENCY
MARIANNE GUNN O'CONNOR
Aug 13, 2026
moving and revelatory study of love and intellect A Thought Without Collision is published today by Truskar Rock and Profile Books
Adrian’s Duncan’s
Summer, 1923. Six-year-old Catherine Carolan grows restless on her parents' farm. It's already clear that her intellect will soon outgrow the two-room schoolhouse across the fields. But in post-Civil War Ireland, an education is not an easy thing for a girl to access, and young Catherine is not the only one in her family who will come to tire of rural life.
Summer, 1951. To ease him through his final days, Dr. Josef Alois calls for someone from his past. Enter Catherine Carolan, now an Oxford professor. As Alois's mind and body falter, Catherine must decide how far she will follow this man that she loves.
A novel in two strands, A Thought without Collision is a beautiful meditation on how we construct our relationship to the world around us.
'Duncan offers a different model of novelistic causality, with characters that feel alive in their vivid and quiet complexity' ― Susannah Dickey
'Very moving, very funny, it will make your brain dance' ― Jo Llyod
'An original voice, a writer who has come to recreate the world on his own terms' ― COLM TÓIBÍN
The book is an elegant rarity in contemporary fiction: a novel in which form, voice, style and story are inseparable from each other. ― Cathy Sweeney
One of the most important and intriguing writers working now ― Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy
Uncanny, strange and exquisite, akin to the fictions of László Krasznahorkai ― Financial Times