Fighting with Shadows Or, Sciamachy - (Irish Literature) by Dermot Healy (Paperback)

About the Book

"Originally co-published in 1984 by Allison & Busby and Brandon Books; a second edition was published in 1986 by Allison & Busby" -- Verso title page.

Book Synopsis

Initially published in 1984, Dermot Healy's stunning first novel, Fighting with Shadows, returns to print after almost thirty years. Largely set in the border village of Fanacross, Co. Fermanagh, as Ireland stumbles clumsily toward modernity, the Allen family negotiate a bitter and troubled terrain. Fighting with Shadows offers extraordinary and poetic glimpses of the compelling lives of ordinary people. The novel's landscape is of borderlands, of in-between spaces; it tells of violently sundered geographical borders, of maddening religious differences, of the anguished gaps between people as they struggle to find each other, and of how the dead reside among its inhabitants long after they've passed. At once realist account and nightmarish magic realist fable, Fighting with Shadows occupies a truly important position in the history of modern Irish fiction.