The Illuminations

by Andrew O'Hagan

Overview

Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize

The Illuminations, the fifth novel from Andrew O'Hagan, a writer "of astonishingly assured gifts" (The New York Times Book Review), is a work of deeply charged beauty—and one that demonstrates, with poignancy and power, that no matter how we look at it, there is no such thing as an ordinary life.

Anne Quirk's life is built on stories—the lies she was told by the man she loved and the fictions she told herself to survive. Nobody remembers Anne now, but in her youth she was an artistic pioneer, a creator of groundbreaking documentary photographs. Her beloved grandson Luke, a captain with the Royal Western Fusiliers in the British army, has inherited her habit of transforming reality. When his mission in Afghanistan goes horribly wrong, he returns to Scotland, where the secrets that have shaped his family begin to emerge. He and Anne set out to confront a mystery from her past among the Blackpool Illuminations—the dazzling lights that brighten the seaside town as the season turns to winter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374174569
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/24/2015
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Andrew O'Hagan is the author of the Man Booker Prize nominee The Illuminations, among other novels. Named one of Granta magazine's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, he has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in London.

With acting credits that span stage and screen, Gildart Jackson is most often recognized for his role as Gideon on Charmed. He has also been featured on Providence and General Hospital, and his theater roles include Trigorin in The Seagull, Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, and Adrian in Private Eyes at the Old Globe.

Editorial Reviews

The literature of war is by its very nature political. If a writer's sentences are personal—what else, really, can they be?—and a writer has trained his lens on a bloody battleground, in reading him we will come to know where he stands, where his passions lie. When it comes to fiction, this passion can often result in rhetoric-spouting characters whose sole purpose is to service the author's ideas. But in The Illuminations…Andrew O'Hagan has created a story that is both a howl against the war in Afghanistan and the societies that have blindly abetted it, and a multilayered, deeply felt tale of family, loss, memory, art, loyalty, secrecy and forgiveness.

The New York Times Book Review - Dani Shapiro

01/26/2015
This empathetic novel from O’Hagan (Our Fathers) revolves around a fictional, largely unknown photographer named Anne Quirk, and Luke, her grandson, who serves in the British Army. Anne suffers from dementia and lives in a retirement community. Luke is serving in Afghanistan, where he listens to death metal, gets stoned, and watches the war tear apart his mentor, Major Scullion. In her youth, Anne was a sharp woman, with a keen eye for beauty in the commonplace. Luke often reminisces on the moments they had together, and the ways she encouraged him to look closely at the world around him. When Luke was 12, she took him to Dunure Harbour, where “they stood holding hands on the jetty, the wind pushing them back as they took great gulps of air. ‘Breathe, Luke!’ she said. ‘You can’t argue with that! Fresh wind off the sea. Oh my. I wish I could catch it with the camera.’ ” As Anne’s memory deteriorates, Luke seeks out details about her life and discovers a life marked by tragedy and self-deceit. O’Hagan sympathetically dissects how falsehoods burrow into daily life; his story provides a deeply felt urge to look more closely at the world and those we love. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

10/01/2014
The elegant and incisive O'Hagan, a multi-award winner named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, tells a story about storytelling and how it must sometimes be blown out of the water. Distinguished documentary photographer Anne Quirk has survived loving a devious man by creating her own ongoing deceptions. But then grandson Luke, a captain in the Royal Western Fusiliers, returns home to Scotland after finding his perceptions of the world wiped clean by the war in Afghanistan. Luke and Anne join forces to investigate a mystery in Anne's past blinking among the Blackpool Illuminations—the glowy artificial lights that bedeck their seaside resort town in darkest winter. Love this author!

Library Journal

★ 2014-12-17
The Scottish author's fifth novel (The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe, 2010, etc.) is a lean yet rich family story built of small and crucial moments in memories and reality across three generations. Anne, at 82, has come to a kind of assisted living facility on Scotland's west coast, and her memory has begun drifting. Often she returns to a time in the 1950s when she was a talented photographer and had a child with another shutterbug. When her grandson, Luke, a British army captain fighting in the Afghanistan campaign of recent years, enters the narrative, it shifts from homey prose snapshots to harsh newsreel realism. The contrast recalls a long article by O'Hagan, also a well-regarded essayist, that looks at deaths in the Iraqi campaign and those affected at home; titled "Brothers," it's among the collected nonfiction in The Atlantic Ocean (2013). Anne and Luke have always been close, and he returns after a nightmarish ambush in Afghanistan to help her in the transition to a nursing home. In the process, he discovers long-concealed secrets and sadness tied to another coastal town, Blackpool, which is famous for the annual lighting ceremony that gives the book the literal stratum of its many-layered title. Family pain comes in many forms, including the exclusion Luke's mother feels from the special tie he has with Anne, the very mixed feelings of Anne's ever helpful neighbor toward her own brood when they visit the facility—even Luke's father-brother relations with his fellow soldiers. The story is ripe for sentimentality, but there's a journalistic cast to the spare prose and tight dialogue that helps O'Hagan almost always avoid it. It's remarkable how much human territory O'Hagan explores and illuminates with a restrained style that also helps drive the novel along at a good clip.

Kirkus Reviews

"It's remarkable how much human territory O'Hagan explores and illuminates with a restrained style that also helps drive the novel along at a good clip." ---Kirkus Starred Review

From the Publisher

The best things in life are not things, says a spokesperson of the minimalist movement whose handbook shows how to get rid of the stuff that keeps you from pursuing your dreams. Joshua Becker is an earnest speaker who articulates every syllable and tries to make every point clear, but his determination sounds altruistic and appealing. It’s a performance and message that will prompt people to take some steps. The simplicity he advocates is not about deprivation; it’s about recognizing that too many possessions can corrupt our spiritual journey, our quest to have a full life. Referencing the teachings of Jesus, he says that simplicity’s rewards are not in what we discard but in what we gain—the awakened life we’ll have when we shed the clutter in our living space that bogs us down. T.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2016 - AudioFile