Critics' Opinion:
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Published Mar 2015
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Anne Quirk's life is built on stories - both the lies she was told by the man she loved and the fictions she told herself to survive. Nobody remembers Anne now, but this elderly woman was an artistic pioneer in her youth, a creator of groundbreaking documentary photographs. Her beloved grandson Luke, now a captain with the Royal Western Fusiliers in the British army, has inherited her habit of transforming reality. When Luke's mission in Afghanistan goes horribly wrong, his vision of life is distorted and he is forced to see the world anew.
Once Luke returns to Scotland, the secrets and lies that have shaped generations of his family begin to emerge as he and Anne set out to confront a mystery from her past among the Blackpool Illuminations - the dazzling artificial lights that brighten the seaside resort town as the season turns to winter.
The Illuminations, the fifth novel from Andrew O'Hagan, "a novelist of astonishingly assured gifts" (The New York Times Book Review), is a beautiful, deeply charged story that reveals that no matter how we look at it, there is no such thing as an ordinary life.
"Starred Review It's remarkable how much human territory O'Hagan explores and illuminates with a restrained style that also helps drive the novel along at a good clip." - Kirkus
"O'Hagan sympathetically dissects how falsehoods burrow into daily life; his story provides a deeply felt urge to look more closely at the world and those we love." - Publishers Weekly
"The elegant and incisive O'Hagan, a multi-award winner named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, tells a story about storytelling and how it must sometimes be blown out of the water." - Library Journal
This information about The Illuminations was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Jerry Bauer
Andrew O'Hagan is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Ganta magazine. His first novel, Our Fathers (1999) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award.
In 2003 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 Best of Young British Novelist.
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