Grace
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Irlande, 1845. Par un froid matin d’octobre, alors que la Grande Famine ravage le pays, la jeune Grace est envoyée sur les routes par sa mère pour tenter de trouver du travail et survivre. En quittant son village de Blackmountain camouflée dans des vêtements d’homme, et accompagnée de son petit frère qui la rejoint en secret, l’adolescente entreprend un véritable périple, du Donegal à Limerick, au cœur d’un paysage apocalyptique. Celui d’une terre où chaque être humain est prêt à tuer pour une miette de pain.
Après Un ciel rouge, le matin et La Neige noire, le nouveau roman de Paul Lynch, porté par un magnifique personnage féminin, possède une incroyable beauté lyrique. Son écriture incandescente donne à ce voyage hallucinatoire la dimension d’une odyssée vers la lumière.
« Paul Lynch, doté d’un style plein d’audace, grandiose et hypnotique, est de ces écrivains qui osent plonger dans les recoins les plus ténébreux de l’âme humaine. » The Irish Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lynch's (Red Sky in Morning) wonderful third novel follows a teenage girl through impoverished Ireland at the height of the Great Famine. Grace Coyle is 14 in 1844, when her mother dresses her as a boy and sends her off to find work to save herself and her destitute family. Grace travels with her 12-year-old brother, Colly, south from Urris Hills. Before they reach Donegal, Colly dies, but his ghost continues to accompany Grace, alerting her to dangers that prove far more plentiful than food or employment. Mistaken for a hireling named Tim, Grace finds work on a cattle drive and a road-building project. She then ends up an itinerant drifter alongside one-armed John Bart. What John and Grace cannot earn, they steal; the ghost of a woman killed during a botched robbery also becomes Grace's traveling companion. Grace eventually makes her way to Limerick before heading home, persisting even when she loses the ability to speak. In Gaelic-lilted poetic prose, Lynch evokes nearly five years of misery: the Samhain (end-of-harvest festival) after flooding destroys the harvest, wintry deprivation, endless days on nameless roads, starvation, and desperation. Heart-wrenching images include Grace's pregnant mother dragging Grace to the killing stump to chop off her hair, Grace eating stolen seed potatoes, and much worse. Lynch's powerful, inventive language intensifies the poignancy of the woe that characterizes this world of have-nothings struggling to survive.
