"Told from both sides of a strained marriage, Life is Elsewhere/Burn Your Flags reveals how individuals deal with change and interpersonal relationships in times of uncertainty and tension [...] a Rashomonian glimpse at 24 hours in the lives of two separate individuals in one unstable relationship." Metropolis Magazine

On Christmas Day, 2020, Cormac is headed for the hills. In the midst of the pandemic the bar he runs in Nagoya, Japan is closed, his marriage to Eri is falling apart and a phone call from his doctor could change everything.

As a teenager in late 1980s Tokyo, Eri documented the rise of legendary female punk band, Burn Your Flags. In the wake of its explosive demise, she shed her identity and ran. Now an unexpected message forces her to exhume long-buried memories and confront her past.

Over twenty-four hours, everything Cormac and Eri have been repressing erupts under the pressure of a year in lockdown. In times like these, it’s hard for anyone to hold on.

“A beautiful, brutal meditation on love and death and the death of love. With these two compelling, tense, gorgeously-drawn and perfectly-paced character accounts, giving us either side of an unhappy marriage, Iain Maloney has come into his own as a writer. From a Japanese mountainside, to the forced bonhomie between ex-pats in an Irish bar, to the angry intensity of feminist teenage punks in Tokyo in the late 80s, this seemingly slight novella travels worlds and light years in a few thousand words. Eri and Cormac, and all the things they say and leave unsaid, will stay with you for a long time.” Kirstin Innes, author of Scabby Queen

“Maloney really hits his stride here as he explores the tensions in a bi-cultural relationship – Japanese woman and Irish man – straining under marital irritations and life’s disappointments, all while the tedium of the pandemic presses down on them like a long-suffering migraine. Follow Maloney’s experienced and knowing eye as he takes his readers back into a world that other writers about Japan don’t normally frequent – that of punk-rock Tokyo in the late 1980s – where drugged-up young women with electric blue hair and yellow Gibson guitars rant and rage against the system. A raw yet compassionate take on a couple trying to deal with their fears and frustrations, both with themselves and with each other, in the time of Covid.” J. David Simons, author of An Exquisite Sense of the Beautiful

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