Migrant: A Libyan Storm is finished. Here is the book.
Migrant: A Libyan Storm (The Storm Series, Book I)
A military and geopolitical thriller.
Malta. John Carroll keeps his past buried. Then the call comes, and answering means facing it.
Out on the Mediterranean, an ageing Irish patrol ship answers a distress call. When the storm breaks, Irish sailors and soldiers are tested to their limits, far from home, for people the world would rather forget.
In Lagos, Ebimie Abari had the house, the family, and the future his powerful patron promised. Then the patron is dead, and Ebimie holds the key to a fortune and to secrets that dangerous men will kill for. He runs with his family: down the Niger, across the Sahara, into the lawless camps of Libya where people are bought and sold. Behind them comes Obi Nwakaeme, the Butcher, who never stops.
Two stories, one sea.
Status: manuscript complete, 68 chapters, around 96,000 words. Book II is in draft. John Carroll is heading into deeper water. More about the book · Follow the Storm Series.
Why Migrant
Ruairí served 25 years in the Irish Naval Service. In 2015 he sailed as Chief of the Engineering Department on the Irish naval flagship LÉ Eithne, the first Irish ship sent to the southern Mediterranean on Operation PONTUS, Ireland’s humanitarian search and rescue mission. Through 2016 and 2017 he trained the crews who followed, sailing with them on passage to the area of operations to ready them for what was waiting. In 2018 he went back in the same role on LÉ Samuel Beckett, with the European naval mission Operation SOPHIA. He saw the crossings up close: the overloaded boats, the people on them, the crews sent out to meet them, and the empty lifejackets in the water. Migrant: A Libyan Storm is fiction, but it is built on that sea. It asks what drives people onto those boats, who profits when they go, and what it costs the sailors left to pick up the pieces.
Non-fiction and academic
Book chapters and papers on the Defence Forces and security policy are listed on the Academic Publications page.
Also writing as Karol Barry
Ruairí writes fantasy and science fiction as Karol Barry. The first chapter of The Vastus Annals, Cheaters Never Prosper, was published in Bard of the Isles in 2020. Read more about Karol Barry.
Be first to hear. Join the monthly newsletter for news of the book, and One True Sentence every month.
