num_pages: 246
description: A New York Times Notable BookWinner of the Guardian Fiction PrizeWinner of the Irish Times Fiction Award and International AwardHugely acclaimed in Great Britain, where it was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the Booker, 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. Breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up--in Ireland or anywhere--that has ever been written.
language: English
title: Reading in the Dark
titlecomplete: Reading in the Dark
genres: Ireland, Coming Of Age, Historical Fiction, Historical, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, College, Irish Literature, Fiction
ratings_count: 4407
awards: awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Booker Prize, awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Guardian Fiction Award, awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Whitbread Award
category: First Novel, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Irish Times International Fiction Prize, awardedAt: 1483257600000
name: Openbook好書獎
category: 年度好書．翻譯書
publisher: Vintage Books