Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome back Irish writer Neil Brosnan, whose work first graced our pages in Belonging. In “Into the Light,” he turns his attention to two sisters separated by decades of silence. Alice, the last of the McCarthys, finds herself newly widowed from an older husband she never loved, childless, and facing major surgery for cancer. With no clear heir to the family estate, her future feels worse than precarious. Then a letter arrives—handwritten, unexpected—from her estranged sister, Rita, who fled decades earlier in the wake of an affair with a married man, pregnant and disgraced.
“Leafing through her mail, Alice gasped in horror at the only handwritten envelope in the pile. Absently, she dropped the other envelopes on the hallstand, disturbing a little cloud of dust motes to sparkle like flying embers in the shaft of rose-tinted sunlight through the stained-glass surround of the hall door. Why now, she wondered, after all these years?”
Rita’s arrival is not the calamity Alice anticipates. Instead, it opens a door to vulnerability, something Alice has never allowed herself. The cracking of her shell brings reconciliation, healing, and an unforeseen answer to her deepest fears.
Neil’s prose carries the texture of weathered stone and wind‑scoured fields, a roughness that disguises and shelters tenderness. His characters, like the landscape, hold more softness than they know how to show. This restraint makes their vulnerability quite poignant as bitterness is replaced by hope.
Read “Into the Light” in Synkroniciti’s Expectations issue, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
After thirty years as singer/guitarist with traditional Irish music groups, Neil Brosnan grew weary of the road and decided to try his hand at fiction writing. His first publication was in Ireland’s Own magazine in 2004. Soon afterwards, he won his first short story competition and since then over one hundred of his stories have appeared in print and digital anthologies and magazines in Ireland, Britain, Europe, Australia, India, the USA and Canada.
A Pushcart nominee, he is a winner of The Bryan MacMahon, The Maurice Walsh, (five times) and The Ireland’s Own, (twice) short story awards. He has published three short story collections: ‘Fresh Water & other stories’ (Original Writing, 2010), ‘Neap Tide & other stories’ (New Binary Press, 2013), and ‘The Loft Window & other stories’ (Savoy Editions, 2025). His debut novel, ‘Room 122‘ (Blue Crystal UK, 2026) is available on Amazon.