SHADE - Softcover

Jordan, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719561876 ISBN 13: 9780719561870

Publisher: John Murray, 2004

Synopsis

Nina Hardy has been murdered. She dies in the garden of the house where she grew up, killed by George, her childhood friend. But her body is never found, and she remains a silent shade, watching-and retelling-the events of her life, and afterlife.

Nina's half-brother, Gregory, makes a pilgrimage home for her funeral, after some thirty years away. There he finds Janie, George's sister and the fourth member of their childhood gang. Together they struggle to make sense of Nina's death and the people they all became.

With Nina's shade as witness, they retrace a story of imaginary friends and hayrides, plays and school dances, a seemingly idyllic Irish childhood beside the mudflats of the River Boyne. As the children reach adolescence, however, they discover that the outside world cannot be kept at bay, and the fragile balance of their friendships is interrupted. Ultimately they will be torn apart by the outbreak of war, brought together again only to find that each has changed almost beyond recognition. And by the end the seemingly senseless crime with which the book begins is revealed in all its full and heartbreaking meaning.

About this title

Review:

We know from the earliest pages of Neil Jordan's numinous, slow-building fourth novel, Shade that its narrator, 50-old Nina Hardy, has been murdered with a pair of gardening shears by her childhood friend George Truite. The mystery is not who has committed this crime, but why. And although George has been for some years a resident of the local insane asylum, only recently allowed to experiment again with independent living, his madness is but a small part of the answer to that question. Set in Ireland near Drogheda, at the mouth of the river Boyne, Shade casts a wistful eye on childhood desires and alliances, and its lonely-girl-in-a-big-house beginnings will call to mind William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault. But like Jordan's greatest success, the film The Crying Game, this novel is full of surprises--and the biggest shocks are not always the most telling. --Jill Harvey

About the Author:

Neil Jordan is the award-winning writer and director of such films as Mona Lisa, Interview with the Vampire, The End of the Affair, and The Crying Game, for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1993. He is also the author of three previous novels-The Past, The Dream of a Beast, and Sunrise with Sea Monster-and a short-story collection, Night in Tunisia.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0719561876
• ISBN 13: 9780719561870
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 319