"Smart, gritty, and tough as a Brooklyn cop bar" "(New York Post),
" Denis Hamill's thrillers have won him a well-deserved cadre of
fans. Now, in an electrifying departure, he unfurls a deeply moving
tale of illfated love played out amid the romantic squalor and
violent underpinnings of contemporary Dublin and New York --
delivering a work of greater resonance than anything he has yet
written.
Looking back, the passion that bloomed between Colin Coyne,
young American filmmaker seeking aesthetic inspiration in Ireland,
and Gina Furey, stunningly beautiful, iron-willed denizen of
Dublin's gypsy criminal underground, seemed as unlikely as it was
overpowering. Colin had just crossed the Atlantic hoping to immerse
himself in Ireland's rich local color, experience a bit of the
storied romance of his forebears' homeland, and then return to New
York having gained a greater sense of the country's mythic and
troubled cultural history. But before he knew what was happening,
all of Colin's bright-eyed hopes were realized, only too vividly --
and at a cruel, life-altering price.
When Colin literally catches Gina red-handed as she picks his
pocket in a hotel pub teeming with hard-edged locals, all it takes
is one look into her dazzling eyes, and Colin falls hard. Purely
for the sake of research -- or so he tells himself -- he hurtles
headlong into the bewitching world of Gina Furey, and finds himself
a star player in a Pygmalion-like relationship rich with dramatic
film possibilities: the earnest Yankee auteur woos and wins the
dangerous gypsy thief. But the tenuous lines separating art and
reality soon dissolve, and the neatly linear screenplay unfolding
inside Colin's head is eclipsedby the brutal chaos and
unpredictability of true life.
Imbuing every scene with a distinctive vibrancy and immediacy,
Hamill employs a powerfully cinematic narrative style that is by
turns devastating and hopeful, bittersweet and hilarious. "Fork in
the Road" is both a tragic love story and the riveting drama of one
man's heartbreaking journey from exhilaration to desolation.