More about the book
"Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s." "The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend - the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly - reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house "as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it."" "Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact."--BOOK JACKET
Book purchase
Reading in the Dark, Seamus Deane
- Language
- Released
- 1998
- product-detail.submit-box.info.binding
- (Hardcover)
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- Title
- Reading in the Dark
- Language
- English
- Authors
- Seamus Deane
- Publisher
- Vintage
- Released
- 1998
- Format
- Hardcover
- ISBN10
- 0394574400
- ISBN13
- 9780394574400
- Series
- Tags
- Fiction, Historical Fiction, Short Stories, Coming Of Age, Literary Fiction, Ireland, Irish Literature, Northern Ireland, 1940s-1950s, Northern Irish Literature
- Original title
- Reading in the dark
- Rating
- 3.75 out of 5
- Description
- "Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s." "The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend - the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly - reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house "as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it."" "Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact."--BOOK JACKET