Reading In The Dark

Hugely 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.

"A wonderful evocation of childhood; a vibrant, unforgettable fragment that leaves you aching for more."  -  Robert McCrum, The Observer

A novel in which the boy narrator grows up enclosed in two worlds. One is legendary - a Donegal house where children are stolen away by demonic forces; the other is actual - the city of Derry in the Northern Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s, a place haunted by political enmities and family secrets.

"In language strikingly lucid and scenes fired by a spare, aching passion, Reading in the Dark combines the intimacy of a memoir with the suspense of a detective story."  -  The New York Times

Seamus Deane As well as Reading in the Dark, which has been translated into more than 20 languages, Seamus Deane has published several books of criticism and poetry; his essay collection Small World: Ireland 1800-2000 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.