A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
DAVID PARK has written eight books including The Big Snow, Swallowing the Sun, The Truth Commissioner, The Light of Amsterdam and, most recently, The Poets’ Wives. He has won the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, the Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature, the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the University of Ulster’s McCrea Literary Award, three times. He has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and been shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award three times. He lives in County Down, Northern Ireland.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Oranges from Spain
The Healing
Stone Kingdoms
The Big Snow
Swallowing the Sun
The Truth Commissioner
The Light of Amsterdam
The Poets’ Wives
ALSO AVAILABLE BY DAVID PARK
THE POETS’ WIVES
‘Outstanding ... Thoroughly enjoyable and much deeper even than the sum of its excellent parts’
IRISH TIMES
Three women, each destined to play the role of a poet’s wife: Catherine Blake, the wife of William Blake – a poet, painter and engraver who struggles for recognition in a society that dismisses him as a madman; Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose work costs him his life under Stalin’s terror; and the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage during the days after her husband’s death as she seeks to fulfil his final wish. Set across continents and centuries these three women confront the contradictions between art and life, while struggling withinfidelities that involve not only the flesh, but ultimately poetry itself.
SUNDAY TIMES
‘Park’s tour-de-force ... The depth of character and emotion [...] are hallmarks of his work as a novelist of enormous sensitivity * * * *’
Dermot Bolger, IRISH MAIL ON SUNDAY
WWW.BLOOMSBURY.COM/DAVIDPARK
THE LIGHT OF AMSTERDAM
Shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award
‘Subtle, understated, not without a hint of menace and always courageous ... An
important book’
Eileen Battersby, IRISH TIMES
It is December in Belfast, Christmas is approaching and three sets of people are about to make their way to Amsterdam. Alan, a university art teacher, goes on a pilgrimage to the city of his youth with troubled teenage son Jack; middle-aged couple Marion and Richard take a break from running their garden centre to celebrate Marion’s birthday; and Karen, a single mother struggling to make ends meet, joins her daughter’s hen party. As these people brush against each other in the squares, museums and parks of Amsterdam, their lives are transfigured as they encounter the complexities of love in a city that challenges what has gone before.
‘Marvellously compelling ... Park takes that most difficult of subjects – recent history – and with graceful integrity explores the difficulties involved in coming to terms with the legacies of the past ... beautifully described in Park’s crystalline prose’
DAILY MAIL
‘A stealthily affecting novel, this could well give more famous names a run for their Booker money’
GQ MAGAZINE
THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER
Winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize
‘Edgy and compelling ... yields moments of heart-shivering beauty ... A magnificent and important book’
Joseph O’Connor, GUARDIAN
In a society trying to heal the scars of the past with the salve of truth and reconciliation, four men’s lives become linked in a way they could never have imagined. Henry Stanfield, the newly arrived Truth Commissioner, Francis Gilroy, recently appointed government minister, retired detective James Fenton and father-to-be Danny share a secret from their past that threatens to destroy the lives they have painstakingly built in the present.
‘A fine, crafted novel, but it is also an important book ... He sets out to examine what it means to be alive – and does so in fictions that are subtle, understated, not without a hint of menace and always courageous’
Eileen Battersby, IRISH TIMES
‘We’re reminded that with writers like David Park, the novel can itself be a kind of truth commission’
NEW YORK TIMES
WWW.BLOOMSBURY.COM/DAVIDPARK
This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1994
Copyright © David Park 1994
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-4088-6602-3
ePub ISBN: 978-1-4088-5902-5
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