Ghost Light

Joseph O’Connor

2010 • Harvill Secker

I also try to be true in the structure of the book as to how memory works. We don’t remember chronologically, we remember in pictures or bits of songs. Molly’s head is full of old junk, like the junk shop where she was born. It’s full of old furniture, and bits of song, and boys she once knew and something Yeats once said to her. It’s like a pack of playing cards, all thrown into the air by that hurricane at the beginning and she picks them up and tries to put them together and sometimes they make little stories and sometimes the reader is given these raw materials and the reader puts the story together.

— Joseph O'Connor

Novel English Language

Ghost Light

Joseph O’Connor

2010 • Harvill Secker

I also try to be true in the structure of the book as to how memory works. We don’t remember chronologically, we remember in pictures or bits of songs. Molly’s head is full of old junk, like the junk shop where she was born. It’s full of old furniture, and bits of song, and boys she once knew and something Yeats once said to her. It’s like a pack of playing cards, all thrown into the air by that hurricane at the beginning and she picks them up and tries to put them together and sometimes they make little stories and sometimes the reader is given these raw materials and the reader puts the story together.