Publication date: May 28, 2024
In 1923, Ernest Hemingway, struggling with the responsibilities of marriage and unexpected fatherhood, has just made a big mistake. He decided that for the baby’s first year he would interrupt his fledgling writing career in Paris and move his family to North America. No longer a freelancer, he now has a gruelling job with a difficult boss, as a staff reporter for the Toronto Daily Star. On his first day, already feeling hemmed in by circumstances, he’s sent to cover a prison break at Kingston Pen.
The escaped convicts, led by notorious bank robber Norman “Red” Ryan, are on the run, making their way from the bush north of Kingston, to the streets of Toronto, and then through towns and cities across the United States. Their crimes become more brazen, their lifestyle increasingly glamorous. Growing more and more preoccupied with Ryan and his willingness to risk everything to be free, Hemingway ponders duty, freedom, and what stops a man from pursuing his dreams.
Please note: While this is a work of fiction,it is based on fact. Carlos Baker, Hemingway's premier biographer wrote after reviewing Hemingway's notebook dated March 6, 1926, "[H]e had been dreaming of doing what he called a picaresque novel ... Its subject went back to one of his first assignments for the Star after his return to Toronto...'It will be about Red Ryan,' [Hemingway] wrote in his black book, 'and his escape from Kingston Pen.' (Baker, Ernest Hemingway A Life Story p. 166)
As a work-in-progress, the novel was titled The Prisoners’ Tale.
An excerpt from Miller's Work-in-Progress, The Prisoners' Tale, placed second in the Penguin Random House of Canada Student Award for Fiction.
"With a perfectly appropriate crisp style, “The Prisoners’ Tale” [now We Were the Bullfighters] is an ambitious, fresh look into a young Ernest Hemingway...Writer Marianne Miller skillfully chooses and crafts details that bring Hemingway to life, and mirror his ambitions and tensions with those of the escaped convicts he follows. Her deft juxtaposition of two legendary characters of the early twentieth century - Nobel Prize winner Hemingway and the notorious criminal Norman “Red” Ryan - allows Miller to build a fascinating story of parallel tension while she explores the notion of freedom and makes us ponder the cells that imprison each of us."
- Alexandra Risen
Author of Unearthed and SCS Creative Writing Certificate Graduate
Judge, Penguin Random House of Canada Student Award for Fiction
Creative Writing Program, University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies
BREAKING NEWS
Dundurn Press Manager of Publishing Operations Meghan Macdonald has acquired world rights to Marianne K. Miller's debut novel, The Prisoners' Tale. Set in 1923, the novel tells the story of notorious bank robber, Norman "Red" Ryan's escape from Kingston Penitentiary and a young and hungry aspiring writer, Ernest Hemingway, who reports on the prison break for the Toronto Daily Star. Questioning what freedom is and how a person can take control of their own destiny, Hemingway and Red Ryan share an unlikely bond as they struggle with the lives they are leading compared to the lives they want. For publication in Spring 2024 to align with 100th anniversary of Hemingway's decision to become a fulltime writer and the Hemingway Society's International Conference to celebrate of the Nobel Laureate's connection to Spain.