If you liked Joseph O'Connor's Ghost Light...
...here are two more to try if you found Ghost Light a haunting read...
The Master by Colm Tóibín
Tóibín’s Booker-shortlisted novel which follows Henry James from the failure of his first play, to his later success – which comes at a great personal cost...
Born into one of America's first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War, Henry James left his country and lived in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among the artists and writers of the day. In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures vividly nineteenth-century European landscapes and the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.
Tóibín is a great and humanizing writer who describes complex relationships in supple, beautifully modulated prose. In The Master, he has written his most ambitious and heartbreaking novel, an extraordinarily inventive encounter with a character at the cusp of the modern age, elusive to his own friends and even family, yet astonishingly vivid and moving here.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The book before the film before Nicole Kidman won her Oscar: Cunningham’s Pulitzer prize-winning book is a deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf.
Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner prizes, The Hours is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. A passionate, profound and haunting story of love and inheritance, hope and despair. Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, taken from her beloved Bloomsbury and lovingly watched over by her husband Leonard, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel. In the brooding heat of 1940s Los Angeles, a young wife and mother yearns to escape the claustrophobia of suburban domesticity and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And in New York in the 1990s, Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich Village apartment and goes shopping for flowers for the party she is giving in honour of her life-long friend Richard, an award-winning poet whose mind and body are being ravaged by AIDS. These are the characters in Michael Cunningham's exquisite and deeply moving novel, which takes Woolf's life and work as inspiration for a meditation on artistic behaviour, failure, love and madness. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, Cunningham's elegant, haunting prose explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader.
