Debut novel, ready for literary agent submission

Fall 2025

Strawberries & Speed Bumps

A Memoir of an Expat Time Traveler

A Novel 

Marcus PJ Tucker

Strawberries & Speed Bumps is a wild, darkly comic ride through identity, memory, and the absurdity of trying to rewrite one’s own story.

Cyril, a sharp-witted, self-sabotaging Jewish-American antihero, can’t escape the shadow of a Little League blunder—or his father’s eternal disappointment. Numbed by cynicism, fueled with dark humor, Cyril impulsively seeks meaning far from home, teaching English in post–Cold War Eastern Europe and stumbling into a CIA mission involving a time-bending mineral called Strawberrium.

His journey begins when he’s recruited by his godfather, Syd, owner of Big Martha Moo Burgers—a fast-food chain that’s secretly a CIA front, determined to win the burger wars by time-traveling to feed history’s greatest armies.

As reality blurs into fantasy, Cyril ricochets through Prague, Krakow, Bangkok, and Namibia—befriending the devil, Ari, a Hutsul Ruthenian; a mafia hitman and his mother, a potion-brewing village Baba Yaga figure from Ukraine; heroin-smugglers using prosthetics intended for Laotian landmine victims; and a televangelical monk with a taste for Gregorian chants and scented candles.

Forced to confront the truth he’s spent a lifetime evading, Cyril must reckon with his identity, heritage, and the strange gravity of fate.

A darkly hilarious and unexpectedly poignant debut novel, Strawberries & Speed Bumps (87,000 words) is a layered, tragicomic meditation on identity, Jewish memory, the absurd pursuit of meaning, and the longing to rewrite one’s story.

Real or imagined, Cyril’s odyssey stands as an elegy—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, Coloring Book Hero, or other apps related to ChatGPT. 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.