I Could Read the Sky

by Timothy O'Grady, Steve Pyke (Photographer)

Overview

'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

'A masterpiece' Robert Macfarlane

'O'Grady does not just respond to Pyke's stark, beautiful photographs: he gives voice to thousands' Louise Kennedy

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 migrant's 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 O'Grady's tender, vivid prose and Steve Pyke's 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781800182721
Publisher:	Unbound
Publication date:	06/08/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	36 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Timothy O’Grady was born in Chicago and has lived in Ireland, London, Spain and Poland. He is the author of four works of non-fiction and three novels. His novel Motherland won the David Higham award for the best first novel in 1989. His novel I Could Read the Sky, a collaboration with photographer Steve Pyke, won the Encore Award for best second novel of 1997. I Could Read the Sky was filmed and also travelled as a stage show. His most recent novel is Light, published in 2004.

In the 1970s, Steve Pyke was a punk rocker with an itch to do something more singular. He borrowed a friend's camera and since that time has photographed for every major magazine. His work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in many international permanent collections.

Editorial Reviews

This is a quietly ambitious, grave and earnest book that mixes the elegiac prose of Chicago-born novelist O'Grady (Motherland) with the haunting photographs of Englishman Pyke to establish, remarkably, a quintessentially Irish novel. It's a tale, in the form of a lament, about sadness, longing and resignation, the story of a west of Ireland man who leaves for England in search of work sometime in mid-century. O'Grady's text consists of impressionistic sketches of a hard but colorful youth left behind, of an entire family marked by poverty and transformed by the dire requirements of growing up poor. It's all recalled from a kind of old-folks home, as the narrator remembers the things he could do"Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds.... Read the sky.... Remember poems"and those he could not"Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch.... Win at cards. Acknowledge the Queen.... Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering." The keening of the narrator is peculiarly uplifting, distinguished by a teary-eyed lucidity. Pyke's photos support this mood like a fiddle might back an Irish air. Unrelated in subject matter to the text, the images nonetheless underscore displacement while extending the sense of loss into real bogs and real faces and incredibly gnarled "spalpeen" hands. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

I Could Read the Sky . . . speaks in the manner of an important work of art, memorably and beautifully. --Dublin Sunday Independent

Anthony Cronin

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. -- The Times Literary Supplement

Charlotte Mendelson

Reviews from the UK edition

"I hope thousands of new readers find themselves keeping a copy under the pillow, unable to let it out of their sight even for the hours of darkness.” Annie Proulx

“The photographs are a reminder of everything which is beyond the power of words... And the words recall what can never be made visible in any photograph.” John Berger

“I felt so overwhelmed, so exhilarated by this beautiful book, one of the most beautiful I have read in years. I remember when I read Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe – I was about seventeen or eighteen – I was so moved, I just bawled. I felt that same feeling reading this book. It's a novel, and at the same time it's a poem.”  Studs Terkel

“The experience of Irish emigration uniquely and powerfully illuminated.” Mark Knopfler

“Wow. I Could Read The Sky was a masterpiece. One of my 'special books' as a graduate student, and I still keep it close, in that grey-green Harvill pb edition. The Harvill list of the 1990s was insanely good. Always held I Could Read The Sky in a triangle in my mind with The Rings of Saturn and A Fortunate Man.” Robert Macfarlane

“O'Grady's novel is imbued with humour, lightening its load of suffering with laughter, and while pulling at the heart's strings, a song of hope emerges.” Suzan Sherman, Bomb

“It reminds us of a great and unforgivable truth – our cities are built on the loneliness of migrant workers, and their great sadness persists down the generations.” Kevin Barry

“What Pyke and O'Grady have done is read out imagination.” Dermot Healy

“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

“There is a rare, fragile species of novel that draws its beauty as much from what it leaves out as from what it puts in. This is one of those: a stark heartbreaking story of an Irish labourer's life in England. “It has been made in the dark,” says John Berger in his preface, lit from within by a cloudy, uncertain glow. Steve Pyke's arresting black-and-white photographs of Irish faces and scenes are scattered throughout, as haunting a record of lives lived under the yoke of time as the novel itself.” Carrie O'Grady, Guardia

“A lament for the cruelty of diaspora strained through such pure understated language you're surprised the words themselves are not weeping on the page.” Bloomsbury Review

“A fine, evocative, engaging act of storytelling that captures the essence of a displaced life for Irish exiles … a work of literary genius.” Gerry Adams

From the Publisher