"My Tale": - A Ballad - Hardcover – November 10, 2025

"My Tale"- A Ballad - Irish singer/songwriter Paul Murphy's epic, unfinished, American West prose-ballad love story.Telling a sweeping, action-surrounded, panegyric love story, this initially began as an expected-to-be 10-15 verse song.As verse after verse kept coming, however, this grew, magically, to an almost 170,000-word novel - told entirely in ballad form.With a central tale of young love, orbited by and intertwining with several others - some, with more than a share of heartache upon them - the emotive, surprise-laden narrative follows 3 generations of players in a small Western town, detailing how Fate played, and plays, cards with their lives.All the while fighting a race to complete the book as he entered the final stages of Progressive F-MND, circa 85% of the tale was laid down before arm paralysis brought an enforced conclusion to the work.Realising he would never complete the story, Paul placed in some leap-ahead chapter-in-verses, and in addition to these, he wrote all of the culminating verses. In his final notes, included here, Paul also detailed the events that would occur to the main characters during those unwritten parts of the saga. As such, although the work remained unfinished, readers know how the tale both progressed, and its dramatic ending.A soaring narrative of loss, abandonment, family, friendship, redemption, heartbreak, corruption, bigotry, hope, and the majesty of emotional and physical love, from the pen of a master of cinematic poetry.Also included here, as a bonus, are reproductions of all the existing original handwritten manuscripts, which were the first 17 pages, and a subsequent section that was for release as a recorded promotional video.An unfinished masterpiece that is still a masterpiece. Read more