No reader dares to cast a stone.The work was long and tedious, carried out in the silence of rooms lit only by narrow windows which were cold in winter and sultry in warmer weather. Their very flaws draw us into their inner complexity. This British author is a master of making readers care about all of his characters. “ The Illuminations is deftly orchestrated and quietly moving. With luck, this masterful novel will bring him the wider readership he deserves.” -Malcolm Forbes, Star Tribune with two Booker Prize-nominations to his name, is a skilled yet criminally undervalued storyteller. “ The Illuminations is a natural extension of O'Hagan's earlier work (aided in part by the reappearance of characters from previous novels) but also an elaborate and ambitious departure from it. “As if it is not enough that Andrew O'Hagan can write like an angel, one has to add that he does it in the style of an intelligent angel.” - Norman Mailer on Andrew O'Hagan Read it and see what I mean.” -John Sutherland, The Times (UK) The illuminations is a novel which validates the greatness of fiction in hands as masterly as Andrew O'Hagan. You could argue (as I would) that only in fiction as good as this will you find war, sex, nationalism and the care of the elderly, truthfully handled. Myself I'd give The Illuminations two Bookers. “Andrew O'Hagan could well win the Man Booker prize of this, his fifth work of fiction. The Illuminations misses nothing, and we can be grateful for the energy and the intelligence with which O'Hagan has presented us with the complexity of human consciousness, and has managed to convey both the beauty and the harshness of the world in which his characters-and his readers-live.” - Francine Prose, Prospect The novel is at once dramatically plotted and leisurely enough to sustain a series of meditations on consciousness, memory, loyalty, identity, friendship, love, and history. The men and women who meet in these pages are as full of contradictions, and as mysterious to others-and to themselves-as real human beings. “ is immensely generous and wholly committed to conveying the complex intelligence of its large and varied cast of characters. “It's a measure of O'Hagan's compassion that after balancing these stories of war and family - braving the battlefield and braving the passing of time - the ultimate note is hopeful and almost gentle, of something that seems real and vital.” -Lucy Daniel, The Telegraph is using the real world to ask real, difficult and important questions: about how the truth gets reshaped and rearranged, and about whether, under every kind of circumstance, it is possible to be true to yourself.” - Hermione Lee, The Guardian The virtuosity of the novel, and also its riskiness, is in the violent contrast between the world of women, families and art, and the world of war. “ moves with bold, imaginative daring and a troubled intensity between men at war and women with their children, between Scotland and Afghanistan, between photography and fiction, and between memory and secrets. “Andrew O'Hagan has created a story that is both a howl against the war in Afghanistan and the societies that have blindly abetted it, and a multilayered, deeply felt tale of family, loss, memory, art, loyalty, secrecy and forgiveness.” -Dani Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review He and Anne set out to confront a mystery from her past among the Blackpool Illuminations-the dazzling lights that brighten the seaside town as the season turns to winter. When his mission in Afghanistan goes horribly wrong, he returns to Scotland, where the secrets that have shaped his family begin to emerge. Her beloved grandson Luke, a captain with the Royal Western Fusiliers in the British army, has inherited her habit of transforming reality. Nobody remembers Anne now, but in her youth she was an artistic pioneer, a creator of groundbreaking documentary photographs. The Illuminations, the fifth novel from Andrew O'Hagan, a writer "of astonishingly assured gifts" ( The New York Times Book Review), is a work of deeply charged beauty-and one that demonstrates, with poignancy and power, that no matter how we look at it, there is no such thing as an ordinary life.Īnne Quirk's life is built on stories-the lies she was told by the man she loved and the fictions she told herself to survive.
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