Author

Publication

1997 - Trafalgar Square, London, England

Language

English

Word Count

58,000 words, Guess

Page Count

232 pages

Identifiers

and 5 more
  • LibraryThing50230
  • Better World BooksKO-939-483
  • Better World Books9780099744412
  • Better World BooksKO-065-831
  • Open LibraryOL19909012M

Classifications

  • DDC820
  • LCCPR6054.E22 R43 1997

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.

Subjects

Other Editions

  • Reading in the darkTrafalgar Square1997

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