I Could Read the Sky

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 'The voice that O'Grady has crafted succeeds so well...running in parallel, Pyke's stark arresting images are laced between the paragraphs and chapters. The interplay between the two mediums is delicately powerful' Hilary White A masterpiece Robert Macfarlane OGrady does not just respond to Pykes 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 migrants 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 OGradys tender, vivid prose and Steve Pykes 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.