Blood-Dark Track
A Family History
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- 6,49 €
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- 6,49 €
Publisher Description
A fascinating family memoir from Joseph O'Neill, author of the Man Booker Prize longlisted and Richard & Judy pick, ‘Netherland’.
Joseph O'Neill's grandfathers – one Irish, one Turkish – were both imprisoned during the Second World War. The Irish grandfather, a handsome rogue from a family of small farmers, was an active member of the IRA and was interned with hundreds of his comrades. O'Neill's other grandfather, a hotelier from a tiny and threatened Turkish Christian minority, was imprisoned by the British in Palestine, on suspicion of being a spy.
At the age of thirty, Joseph O'Neill set out to uncover his grandfather's stories, what emerges is a narrative of two families and two charismatic but flawed men – it is a story of murder, espionage, paranoia and fear, of memories of violence and of fierce commitments to political causes.
Reviews
'He uncovers fascinating parallels between the two men, illuminating the ways in which individual lives mesh with history' Sunday Times
'This is a beautifully written and complicated book, in which difficult perceptions are expressed with forensic honesty' Sunday Telegraph
'His thoroughness and energy are phenomenal' London Review of Books
'Blood-Dark Track moves adroitly between Ireland and the Middle East, and interlaces O'Neill's own quest to discover what his grandfathers were up to with fascinating and unfamiliar insights into the history of their times…the result is riveting' Sunday Express
'Surprisingly, considering this charged material, Joseph O'Neill manages to construct an elaborate, patient, almost detached memoir. This is a stealthy, evidential enterprise…a big cat of a book. It creeps up on you, then pounces. And once it has you in its grip, watch out, because it doesn't let go in a hurry' Evening Standard
About the author
Joseph O’Neill is an Irish barrister living in New York. He is the author of three novels, ‘Netherland’, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, ‘This is the Life’ and ‘The Breezes’.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The son of a Turkish mother and an Irish father, lawyer and novelist O'Neill was born in Ireland, raised in the Hague, spent summers in his mother's hometown on the Mediterranean and studied in Britain. When he was 10 or 11, in the mid-1970s, he learned that both of his late grandfathers were imprisoned during WWII. Twenty years later, he took it upon himself to learn why. The quest to determine whether his IRA-soldier grandfather was a murderer and his Turkish grandfather, a hotelier, was an Axis spy took him from County Cork to the coast of Turkey, and deep into the "dream-bright horrors" of history. O'Neill's Irish grandfather, jailed for five years for IRA activities, shared an internment camp with Nazi and Allied POWs held there "in accordance with Ireland's neutrality policy." At the same time, his Turkish grandfather suffered psychological abuse and extreme paranoia in various British and Free French military prisons filled with Lebanese, Turkish and Syrian " 'suspects and known pro-Axis sympathizers.' " During his research, O'Neill collected facts about everything from the poison used to eliminate the fungus that destroyed the Irish potato crop in the late 1840s to ethnic divisions among Armenians, Muslims and non-Muslim Turks in pre-WWII Turkey. Anyone interested in the Middle East, Ireland or WWII will find this account fascinating. Readers looking for tension, family drama and pathos, however, may be frustrated with the undifferentiated details and narrative detours that sometimes encumber this story of a grandson trying to connect with the grandfathers he never knew. Photos, 2 maps.
