Love and Other Submerged Objects

By Imogen Tully

Eleven thousand years in a bog. One morning in a dinghy. This Irish screwball romance is a modern retelling of Delina Delaney by Amanda McKittrick Ros (1898). Ros is famous as one of the worst novelists in English, and the Inklings held contests to read her prose aloud without laughing.

Four days. One bone. Sunday at two.

Dr. Gifford Rathbourne-Cave has a plan. On Sunday the trustees of the National Museum come down from Dublin, his mother signs the deed, and the last missing piece of the Ballybeg Elk goes back on the largest deer that ever lived. That piece is a Pleistocene antler, eleven thousand years old, unique and irreplaceable. Columba Castle will be saved. He will be able to sleep. He has a fianc e in Dublin. All the way from the city he has rehearsed the sentence he intends to say to the courier.

Delina Delaney is reversing a quad bike down the slip at Ballybeg. Behind it come a trailer, a year's mussel rope, and a dinghy on a tow-rope. She tells him to mind himself.

The case goes into the boat. The boat goes out on the ebb. Gifford goes into the harbour after his hat.

Between Wednesday and Sunday they will lose the bone, catalogue a house that has never been written down, and discover that they work extremely well together. This is inconvenient for the fianc e, the parish, a dog called George, and at least one emu. The trustees are still coming. Sunday is still at two.

A closed-door romantic comedy of mussels, museums, and opposites who cannot stop colliding, starring a man who can date the Ice Age and has no method whatsoever for the present tense.

This book is for you if you like:

opposites attract (uptight scientist a woman who will not be hurried)fish-out-of-water farce in a small Irish villageforced proximity, a ticking clock, and a MacGuffin with antlersphysical comedy played dead straighta love story that earns the kiss and stays behind the bedroom doora whole parish that already knows his mother's name

For readers who loved The Rosie Project, the chaos of Bringing Up Baby, and Irish comic fiction with a real village in it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HMVF95PP
• ISBN13: 9798174883055
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"