Tommy Storm

Tommy Storm is the first novel by Irish author A.J. Healy. The protagonist is Tommy Storm, a boy, aged 11½, who experiences friendship and a love for his planet only when he is sent far away from Earth with four other Earth kids, to a school of sorts on the far side of the Milky Way, populated by “aliens”. The year is 2096—a time when it is always 34˚C, birds are extinct and it's raining at all times everywhere on Earth due to “The Great Climate Enhancement”. Only the very tops of mountains protrude above sea-level and everyone lives in floating cities.

The book follows Tommy’s first adventure. A sequel, Tommy Storm and the Galactic Knights, was released in Ireland on September 24, 2009, with more to come.

Declan Kiberd, one of Ireland’s foremost literary critics has said of Tommy Storm: “Brilliant. Hilarious. An intergalactic Gulliver’s Travels.”

In December 2006, Tony Hickey said in Village magazine: “Tommy Storm is a knockout achievement that succeeds on so many levels and satirises so many cultural and literary genres that, to me, it reads as if Flann O’Brien had taken to writing science-fiction.”