Books
Mistaken
Menace both real and imagined haunt two Dubliners in this “unsettling . . . seductive” modern Gothic “that ultimately leaves one gasping” (Irish Times).“Vampires, secrets, the mysteries of identity: the obsessions that run through the director Neil Jordan’s films are at the center of his beautifully enigmatic novel . . . of two look-alike men who feed off each other’s souls all their crisscrossed lives” (The New York Times).
Kevin Thunder and Gerald Spain have grown up on opposite sides of the Dublin economic divide. Kevin’s father is a bookie and his mother takes in lodgers on the city’s impoverished northside. Gerald, a lawyer’s son, is afforded a more well-heeled upbringing. Yet they share a growing awareness of each other through episodes of mistaken identity. At first, innocent enough—one approached by the other’s confused girlfriend, or being called out to in the street. But Kevin is unnerved by more than a doppelganger. He lives next door to the one-time home of Bram Stoker. And the shadows of the author’s evil creation, as well as those cast by a lookalike stranger, stretch far across his early years. It’s only when a tragic death sends both young men down a darker path, that Kevin and Gerald are destined to meet.
A “beautifully enigmatic . . . darkly luminous” (The New York Times Book Review) thriller, Mistaken is also “the best novel I’ve read about Dublin in years” (The Independent).
The Past
A Novel
On June 1st, 1914, Una O’Shaughnessy sends a postcard home from a Cornish seaside town. Back in two weeks, she promises. But seven months later, she still has not returned to Ireland, and she sends another postcard, this one signed Una, Michael, Rene (!).The Past is the story of Rene, this unexpected child, as told by her own child as he searches for the truth about his parents’ mysterious and romantic history. Through the reminiscences of his mother's friend, the pieces of the past begin to fit together into a delicate mosaic of the truth. What really happened in that seaside town? Why does the past seem to hold so many secrets?
Set over twenty-five years, travelling from Cornwall to Dublin and the Irish Provinces, The Past is a beautiful novel of love and longing, created by one of the preeminent artists of our time.