Ciaran Carson - Böcker

‘I write to try to see you as you were, or what you have become. You left no forwarding address: that was part of your intention. For when we wrote those letters to each other all those years ago, we wrote as much for ourselves as for each other.’More than twenty years after the end of their love affair, Gabriel receives a cryptic postcard from old flame Nina. It is the first of thirteen cards from her, each one provoking a series of reveries about their life together in 1980s Belfast.The Pen Friend is, however, much more than a love story. As Gabriel teases out the significance of the cards, his reveries develop into richly textured meditations on writing, memory, spiritualism and surveillance. The result is an intricate web of fact and fiction – moving easily between such varied subjects as the Troubles, Esperanto and John Lavery – a strange and wonderful novel by one of our finest Irish writers.If you enjoyed The Pen Friend, you might also enjoy Ciaran Carson’s Exchange Place, a brilliant thriller set in Paris and Belfast.

This compendium, made from Ciaran Carson’s previous collections, reveals one of the most remarkable and sustained tours de force in contemporary poetry: the poet’s reimaginign of his native city of Belfast. Carson introduces the reader to a city as full of surreal narrative and imaginative possibility as Borges’ Buenos Aires or Calvino’s Venice; at the same time he never shirks from taking a hard look at the city in all its political and cultural complexity.In its refusal to simplify or romanticize, The Ballad of HMS Belfast is an indispensable guidebook to a city few will know exists.‘He is the master of the long line; these poems are manic, frightening and funny, and somehow manage to catch the tone of life in modern Belfast’ John Banville, Irish Times‘It is about Belfast past and present and is full of surprises, savage and witty, human and extravagant. His voice is truly original, both intelligent and passionate’ A. S. Byatt, Sunday Times Books of the Year