Debut novel, ready for literary agent submission

2025

Strawberries & Speed Bumps

A Memoir of an Expat Time Traveler

A Novel 

Marcus PJ Tucker

Numbed by cynicism and fueled by dark humor, Cyril’s journey begins when he moves to post–Cold War Eastern Europe to teach English—only to be recruited by his godfather, Syd, owner of Big Martha Moo Burgers, a CIA front. Determined to win the burger wars by time-traveling to feed history’s greatest armies, Syd gives Cyril a mission: locate the time-bending mineral known as Strawberrium.

As reality blurs into fantasy, Cyril ricochets through Prague, Kraków, Bangkok, and Namibia. While teaching in Eastern Slovakia, he befriends the Devil—Ari, a Hutsul Ruthenian. Through Ari, he’s introduced to a mafia hitman who takes him to meet his mother—a potion-brewing Baba Yaga figure in a remote Ukrainian village. Along the way, Cyril peddles scented candles for a televangelical monk with a taste for Gregorian chants and becomes entangled with heroin smugglers using prosthetics intended for Laotian landmine victims.

Forced to confront the truth he’s spent a lifetime avoiding, Cyril must reconcile with his identity, his heritage, and the strange gravity of fate. Real or imagined, his odyssey is a requiem for the lost, the hollow, and the gloriously absurd.

*****

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. 

Text copyright © 2025 by Marcus PJ Tucker All rights reserved. Visual images are generated by DALL-E. No written content, prose or any of my words are written by language models such as ChatGPT.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.