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Ghost Light: A Novel Hardcover – February 1, 2011

4.1 out of 5 stars 39 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (February 1, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0374161879
  • ISBN-13: 978-0374161873
  • Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 1 x 8.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #231,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

By Evelyn Getchell TOP 500 REVIEWER on February 4, 2011
Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
Ghost Light: A Novel is a transcendent experience, a radiant love story which speaks of a passion that shimmers in ghost light, "An ancient superstition among people of the stage. One lamp must always be left burning when the theatre is dark, so the ghosts can perform their own plays."

Joseph O'Connor with a virtuosic, literary master stroke has melded fact with fiction in this captivating tribute to love ~ the story of Irish playwright J M Synge and his lover Molly Allgood, the Irish actress with the stage name of Maire O'Neill. This beautiful novel of Irish lore and lyricism has given me hours and hours of pure reading pleasure. Ghost Light: A Novel is so stunning that I found myself rereading paragraphs or entire pages over and over again just to revel in literary excellence.

When I come across a book like this in which I am particularly captivated, I mark certain pages that I want to reread again later with little slips of paper. When I finished this book, I had to laugh at myself because practically all of its pages have little slips of paper sticking out between them! This is one of those rare books where one can open up to any page and find the most extraordinary language, imagery, metaphor, or a passage or phrase that will transport one to another time, another place. For many of these remarkable qualities I am reminded of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and I know that this book is of those great traditions and deserves to be read again and again.

Yet it is not a book for everybody.
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Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
This is one of the most beautifully written and well-conceived novels I've read in a very, very long time. This not a quick fast-paced item nowadays called "a read." It is an honest-to-goodness book. It cannot be skimmed, constructed as it is with a glorious use of language that is sheer pleasure, along with characters so intimately crafted that it is actually wrenching to come to the end and be separated from both the writing and the people. For those who aren't in a tearing hurry to get through the next item on their bedside reading stack, this is a dream of a book. I am still marveling over the wealth of detail, past and present, all of it stemming from the mind of a touching, irritating, fully realized, funny, rude, gifted and good-hearted, utterly remarkable woman. Don't miss this! This is a keeper, a book to be reread. Most highly recommended.
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Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor is a brilliant and complex book. It is one of the best books I have read in the last five years. The language is poetic and hallucinatory and this is a book where one can't skip passages or lines. Every word is necessary and the whole is a gift put together with the greatest care and love.

The novel is about a grand love affair between Molly Allgood, an actress (stage name Maire O'Neill) and the playwright John Synge, most well-known for his play, Playboy of the Western World. The book starts out in 1952 on the streets of post-war London. Molly, 67 years old, is walking the cold blustery city and freezing. She lives in a hovel and drinks too much. She is hungry and cold, going from one sheltered spot to another and hallucinating from the the alcohol, her hunger and her freezing. She is on her way to a BBC radio reading and on her way she remembers, in broken dream sequences, her relationship with John Synge.

Molly and John Synge had an affair and at the time of their affair she was eighteen years old and he was thirty-six. John was very ill, most likely with lymphoma but perhaps tuberculosis or some other lung disease. He had one neck surgery after another. He lived only two years after they met. They came from opposite sides of the tracks. Molly was an actress who was from a mixed marriage - protestant and catholic - and she worked with her mother in a drapery shop. John came from old money and was of protestant background. He had a symbiotic relationship with his mother which made his relationship with Molly doomed from the start as his mother would not permit him to bring Molly home and threatened to cut off his trust fund should he marry her.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Fantastic read. Joseph O'Conor is an over-looked writer - in my opinion he completely captures the era which this book depicts. I cried my eyes out reading this book and I've been told I don't have a heart so kudos to Mr. O'Connor for soliciting that response from me. It helps if you are Irish or had Irish parents so you can identify with the themes in the book - an aging Irish actress living in London reflecting on her life while it becomes obvious to us that she has fallen deep into the bottle. His understanding of the loneliness of immigration cuts right to the bone.
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Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
John Millington Synge is my favorite Irish playwright and I loved seeing him in a personal light in Ghost Light: a Novel. While some of O'Connor's details may be subjective, I felt he was true to Synge's character and what we know of his private life. The atmosphere was rendered beautifully in a manner appropriate for such a heart-touching artist.
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