The Illuminations Andrew Ohagan by Andrew O'hagan 9780771068324, 0771068328, 077106832, B00NDTU9WO instant download after payment.

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.

How much do we keep from the people we love? Why is the truth so often buried in secrets? Can we learn from the past or must we forget it?  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. In her youth, she was an artistic pioneer, a creator of ground-breaking documentary photographs. Her beloved grandson Luke, a British army captain, has inherited her habit of transforming reality. 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.

"The Scottish author’s fifth novel is a lean yet rich family story built of small and crucial moments in memories and reality across three generations... 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

Andrew O'Hagan is the author of the novels Our Fathers, Personality, and Be Near Me, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and The Guardian (UK). He was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.