I Could Read The Sky

This is a lyrical novel in which the words wind their way through and alongside a sequence of black and white images. It tells the story of a man coming of age in the middle years of the twentieth century, who leaves Ireland for the promise of English wealth. Now, in the last hours of his life, he remembers the sea coasts and potato fields of the West of Ireland, and the factories and building sites of England where he worked. He is haunted by the faces of the family he left behind him, and by the land that is still within him. He remembers the country and the seascapes, the bars and the boxing booths, the music he played and the woman he loved. Timothy O'Grady's words and Steve Pyke's atmospheric images combine to reflect the story of the man's life and the process of memory itself.

Winner of Encore Award 1998

“If the words tell the story of the voiceless, the bleak, lovely photographs that accompany it 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 Times Literary Supplement "Speaks in the manner of an important work of art, memorably and beautifully" -- Anthony Cronin Sunday Independent "There are not many books [this year] that seem to me written with comparable force [or] depth of feeling" -- Dan Jacobson Sunday Telegraph "What Pyke and O'Grady have done is read our imagination" -- Dermot Healy Sunday Tribune

Timothy O'Grady was born in Chicago and has lived in Ireland, London, Spain and Poland. He was in Las Vegas after receiving a fellowship from the Black Mountain Institute there and stayed on for another year to teach. He has written three works of non-fiction, Curious Journey, On Golf and, most recently, Divine Magnetic Lands, an account of a return journey around America after thirty years of living in Europe. His novels are Motherland, I Could Read the Sky and Light.

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