Book reading in the dark ISBN 0224044052

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Thinking Of You - The Ultimate Escapist Read
Jill Mansell, unlike other writers in the rom-com arena, seems to get better with every book she writes. Thinking of You is her latest offering and proves that it is possible to get better with age!

Ginny Holland, a best selling author if left rattling around in her house on her own after daughter Jem goes to university. Lonely, she advertises her spare room for rent. Instead of a happy roommate, she gets moaning Laurel who is still hung up on her ex-boyfriend. If that wasn’t enough, Ginny finds herself lusting after two men who can only be bad for her. Will Ginny get the man of her dreams, or will he be the one that gets away?

Mansell has a disarming ability to create characters that you already know and that tends to make her books impossible to put down. This book is no different. It is charmingly written, hopelessly funny and will make you forget all of your own troubles as soon as you read the first page.

(ISBN: 0755328116, ISBN-13: 9780755328116)

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Title: Reading in the Dark
Author: Seamus Deane
ISBN: 0224044052
EAN: 9780224044059
220 Pages
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Binding: Hardcover
Publication date: 1996-09-05

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The Derry of poet Seamus Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark is a perilous place. Ghosts haunt the stairwells of apartment buildings, a curse follows two families down through the generations, close friends turn out to be police informers and the police are as likely to persecute an innocent man as protect him. And hovering over all the violence, poverty and despair of 1940s Northern Ireland is the spectre of the "Troubles". The hero of the novel is an unnamed young man whose life turns upside down when a policeman frames him. Deception becomes his only means of self-defence. But the initial lie on the part of the policeman and the narrator's corresponding trickery are only part of the tangled web Deane weaves here. Early in the novel we learn that Uncle Eddie, an Irish Republican Army gunman, was blown up in the town distillery in 1922. In addition to sorting out his own problems, the narrator seeks the truth about his uncle's death.

Reading in the Dark sounds grim, and in some respects it is, yet leavening is provided by infusions of the Irish folktales and legends that inform the characters' daily life. And then there is the language. Deane is a poet, and his prose shows it: sex is like fire, "glinting with greed and danger"; ice snores and candles are swathed in a "thick drapery of wax". Readers looking for a thoughtful, serious and beautifully written novel will find one in Reading in the Dark.

A boy's childhood is lived out in two dimensions. One is legendary: the Sun-Fort of Grianan; where children are stolen away by demonic forces. The other is actual: the city of Derry in the the 1940s and 1950s; a place that is also haunted by political enmities, family secrets and intrigue.

2003-05-15 Haunting..in every sense

It's quite a while since I read this book and it still haunts my thoughts and dreams. A book that gives the average Brit some idea what it's like to live on the edge of war and peace, one community and another, the industrial and the agricultural economy, and the physical and the ghost or paranormal world.

Quite beautiful, and at the same time seriously disturbing.

Thank you Mr Deane.