What is George McFly Day? It's the bit in Back To The Future where George McFly's box of books arrives from his publisher and his career as a science fiction writer becomes a reality. If you remember the film, in one version of the present George doesn't follow his dreams to become a writer because he's afraid of failure, but in the altered version of the present a more courageous George McFly does pursue his ambition and when his box of books comes it's a kind of vindication. This particular George McFly day is for my book The Sun Is God which is a murder mystery novel set in the South Pacific of 1906 among a group of aristocratic German nudists who believed that eating only coconuts would make them immortal. Amazingly this is a true story which I have only slightly fictionalised....
You can read the first newspaper review of The Sun Is God, here. It's from the knowledgeable Declan Burke in The Irish Times. Money quote:
Based on an improbable but true story, the novel offers a fascinating twist on the traditional “locked room” mystery, as only the island’s miserable few inhabitants can be considered suspects in the alleged murder. Prior, as reluctant a sleuth as has ever shuffled into the genre, makes for a blackly humorous guide to a palm-fringed, sun-drenched idyll that is both heaven and hell. McKinty’s novel is an ambitious offering that incorporates a terrific subplot exploring pre-first World War colonial tensions between Britain and Germany. But it’s the investigation of the central mystery, with its undertones of Paradise Lost, that proves most entertaining.
