The Blackwater Lightship book cover

The Blackwater Lightship

288 pages
|
Published: 13 Aug 1999
|
Editions
|
Details

This edition

ISBN: 9780743203319

Format: Paperback

Language: English

Publisher: Scribner

Publication date: 5 June 2005

View on Amazon

Description

It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora, have come together to tend to Helen's brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With Declan's two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other. ​

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Blackwater Lightship is a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. In spare, luminous prose, Colm Tóibín explores the nature of love and the complex emotions inside a family at war with itself. Hailed as "a genuine work of art" (Chicago Tribune), this is a novel about the capacity of stories to heal the deepest wounds.