I Could Read the Sky

‘Think about a tune … the unsayable, the invisible, the longing in music. Here is a book of tunes without musical notes … It wrings the heart’ John Berger

‘A masterpiece’ Robert Macfarlane

‘O’Grady does not just respond to Pyke’s stark, beautiful photographs: he gives voice to thousands’ Louise Kennedy

‘The experience of Irish emigration uniquely and powerfully illuminated’ Mark Knopfler

‘If the words tell the story of the voiceless, the bleak lovely photographs show their faces. Fiction rarely gets as close to the messy, glorious truth as do memories and photographs. This rare novel dares to use both’ Charlotte Mendelson, TLS

An old man lies alone and sleepless in London. Before dawn he is taken by an image from his childhood in the West of Ireland, and begins to remember a migrant’s life. Haunted by the faces and the land he left behind, he calls forth the bars and boxing booths of England, the potato fields and building sites, the music he played and the woman he loved.

Timothy O’Grady’s tender, vivid prose and Steve Pyke’s starkly beautiful photographs combine to make a unique work of fiction, an act of remembering suffused with loss, defiance and an unforgettable loveliness. An Irish life with echoes of the lives of unregarded migrant workers everywhere. Since it was first published in 1997, I Could Read the Sky has achieved the status of a classic.

About the audiobook:

This is a unique audiobook combining the author's reading with a score created by fiddler Martin Hayes, one of Ireland's greatest traditional musicians. This is a book about exile with music acting as one of the migrant's psychic anchors to what he left behind in Ireland. Music is a theme and a recurrent presence in the book and is now brought to vivid life by Martin Hayes in this audiobook.

'I was transfixed when I first saw Martin Hayes play a white electric violin in a bar in Chicago more than thirty years ago and have remained so since. Our conversations and his playing move through what I’ve written about music in I Could Read the Sky. He is one of, if not the best live performers I’ve seen. His sense of music is exquisitely delicate, intense, acute, profound, sublime. He brings you directly to the great range of human emotions that is in Irish music. He is both timeless and innovative. He is always after the pure thing. It was a great pleasure to sit beside him in Madrid as he put notes to the words of this book.'

Timothy O'Grady