Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 27 May 2010.
Joseph O’Connor, best known for his award winning (and Richard and Judy selected) Star of the Sea, has written, in Ghost Light an exhilarating, passionate and uplifting tale of love and loss. Based loosely on real events and set in an Edwardian Dublin and a teeming and seedy Manhattan in the 1920’s, we follow the love affair of the genius Irish playwright J M Synge and rising starlet Molly Allgood, just 19 to his 31.
'A virtuoso display of literary talent...brimming with sympathy and skill' Irish Times
Dublin, 1907. A young actress begins an affair with a damaged older man, the leading playwright at the theatre where she works.
Outspoken and flirtatious, Molly Allgood is a Catholic girl from the slums of Dublin, dreaming of stardom in America. Her lover, John Synge, is a troubled genius, whose life is hampered by convention and by the austere and God-fearing mother with whom he lives. Their affair, sternly opposed by friends and family, is quarrelsome, affectionate, and tender.
Many years later, Molly, now a poverty-stricken old woman, makes her way through London's bomb-scarred city streets, alone but for a snowdrift of memories. Her once dazzling career has faded but her unquenchable passion for life has kept her afloat.
'Masterful in its management of re-imagined lives and the time they inhabit' Financial Times
