|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
‘Think about a tune … the unsayable, the invisible, the longing
in music. Here is a book of tunes without musical notes … It
wrings the heart’ John Berger ‘A masterpiece’ Robert
Macfarlane ‘O’Grady does not just respond to Pyke’s stark,
beautiful photographs: he gives voice to thousands’ Louise
Kennedy ‘The experience of Irish emigration uniquely and
powerfully illuminated’ Mark Knopfler ‘If the words tell the
story of the voiceless, the bleak lovely photographs show their
faces. Fiction rarely gets as close to the messy, glorious truth as
do memories and photographs. This rare novel dares to use both’
Charlotte Mendelson, TLS An old man lies alone and sleepless in
London. Before dawn he is taken by an image from his childhood in
the West of Ireland, and begins to remember a migrant’s life.
Haunted by the faces and the land he left behind, he calls forth
the bars and boxing booths of England, the potato fields and
building sites, the music he played and the woman he loved. Timothy
O’Grady’s tender, vivid prose and Steve Pyke’s starkly
beautiful photographs combine to make a unique work of fiction, an
act of remembering suffused with loss, defiance and an
unforgettable loveliness. An Irish life with echoes of the lives of
unregarded migrant workers everywhere. Since it was first published
in 1997, I Could Read the Sky has achieved the status of a classic.
Over forty million people a year travel to Vegas, more than to
Mecca. It is a global celebrity, an improbable oasis, a place
offering bank-breaking fortunes and instant gratification, 24/7,
with no moral debits. Award-winning writer Timothy O'Grady lived in
Vegas for two years. He finally began to understand it when he
talked to people who had grown up there, the children of the card
dealers and cocktail shakers, the jugglers and the dancers - young
people who had been bearing witness to this strange city all their
lives. One had her student loans and credit card limits stolen by
her father. Another fled a sequence of exploiters until she found
herself living in the storm drains under the casinos. There is the
boy whose father entered him into a drinking contest when he was
eight, the casino owner's son, the erudite contortionist turned
stripper. Each tells their own tale. In Children of Las Vegas,
O'Grady renews his partnership with renowned photographer Steve
Pyke. Through short essays, Pyke's portraits and ten witness
testimonies, he pierces the city's glittering facade to reveal the
darker reality that lies beneath.
In this collection, one of Ireland's best-known political figures
brings us new and selected stories of politics, of family, of love
and of friendship. These are portraits of Ireland, and especially
Belfast, old and new, in times of struggle and in times of peace,
showing how our past is always part of our present. Sometimes sad,
sometimes funny, always moving, these are stories of ordinary
people captured with wit, with heart and with understanding.
Introduction by Timothy O'Grady.
|
|