✨💙“prepare to be awed"
Happy Pub Day to The Bells
As The Bells opens, thirty-three-year-old Niall O’Malley has failed a five-year mission to live as a monk and is attempting to redefine himself as a high school teacher in New Jersey. The transition has been bumpy. He loves teaching history to inner city teens, but he hits a roadblock when a belligerent student, Colton, possibly a white-supremacist, behaves in ways that threaten Niall. As troubles mount at school, Niall’s girlfriend Lluvia pressures him into make a deeper commitment to their relationship. She wants them to move in together with Lluvia’s pre-teen daughter and elderly mother. Haunted by his failure as a Cistercian monk and his troubles with one man in particular, the abusive Brother Thomas, Niall abandons Lluvia and heads back to his old monastery in Massachusetts for a final showdown with Thomas, now dying of ALS. Redemption for Niall is elusive as he strives to mend his faith.
Cai Emmons (1951-2023) was the author of six novels—His Mother’s Son, The Stylist, Weather Woman, Sinking Islands, Unleashed, and Livid—and a story collection, Vanishing. She held a BA from Yale University and two MFAs, one from New York University in film and the other from the University of Oregon in fiction. Before turning to fiction, Emmons wrote plays and screenplays. Winner of a Student Academy Award, an Oregon Book Award, and the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize, and finalist for the Narrative, The Missouri Review, and the Sarton awards, she taught at a variety of institutions, most recently in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon.
Visit Cai Emmons’ website at
Praise for The Bells
“If you are new to the work of Cai Emmons, prepare to be awed by her sentences and immersed in her world of ideas, as she grapples with goodness, faith, and forgiveness in The Bells. If you are a longtime fan of Cai’s, you will marvel at the gift she left us, a feat of generosity and imagination. What begins as a story about Niall, a lapsed monk now corralling a classroom of rowdy teenagers, soon transforms into an examination of making oneself whole in the face of a troubled past. Remarkably, though, The Bells, a book Cai finished on the day she died, is a story of life: how to live fully, embrace our messy complications, and swim toward love.”—Miriam Gershow, author of Closer and Survival Tips: Stories
Check out an excerpt here,
Colton places a notebook on the desk with a ceremonial arc of his arm, and leans forward, uncharacteristically eager, opening the notebook and ironing the page flat with his palm. Apparently, he is proud.
“I’ve done a lot,” he says. “You know, research.”
“Great!” Niall says. He stares at the page Colton has opened to. There are columns of words written in the indecipherable scrawl of a child. A learning disability, Niall remembers Colton’s mother saying, dyslexia. A pang of sympathy passes through him. “Good for you, Colton. Tell me about it.”
“So, the boardwalk thing, right, on Halloween? I’m gonna write about, you know, why some people think white people are smarter than other people.”
Niall nods only because no other response comes to him. He feels stupid, aphasic. White people. Colton wants to write about white people?
“Say more,” Niall says.
“You know, all the white people who want the immigrants and colored people out.”
“Colored people?”
“People of color. Whatever. The point is so many people think those people don’t belong here, and I wanna write about that. Why it is, you know? What makes them think that?”
“Those people. You mean the Black and Brown people?”
“Yeah, them.”
“Think about the words you use, Colton. The words you choose convey a lot.”
“Why are you always nitpicking with me when you know what I mean?”
“I don’t actually know what you mean. I need to clarify that you don’t believe that—that immigrants and people of color don’t belong here?”
Colton slaps his forehead. “There you go again, assuming the worst about me.”
“I’m just trying to understand.”
Colton’s head swivels out to the other students. Most are bent over their papers, but Mason is watching them, and he and Colton shake their heads in solidarity. Some of the other students look up, corralled by the jiggling synapses of Colton’s energy. Turning back to Niall, Colton’s entire body is tense with fury, and Niall feels a matching fury mounting in himself.
