On an autumn day in 1952, an elderly Irish actress makes her way through the windblown streets of London to a job at the BBC. Last night's hurricane has wreaked havoc, raising memories of blackout and blitz. Recollections of Broadway seem to walk with her through bomb-blasted squares. Scenes from a doomed courtship are rehearsed in her mind once again: it's one of those October days when the past comes back. Moving between a sepia-tinted Edwardian Dublin and a teeming Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1920s, from hunger in London's West End to the elegant theatres of San Francisco, this is a love story, a tale of journeys, and a powerful meditation on the hope to be found in the everyday. Loosely based on real events in the lives of the greatest Irish playwright of the twentieth century and the younger woman who was his fiancee at the time of his tragically early death, Ghost Light is an exhilarating, passionate and uplifting adventure in storytelling from the award-winning author of Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls.

Dublin 1907, a city of whispered rumours. A young actress begins an affair with a damaged older man, the leading playwright at the theatre where she works. Rebellious and flirtatious, Molly Allgood is a girl of the inner city tenements, dreaming of stardom in America. She has dozens of admirers but in the backstage of her life there is a secret. Her lover, John Synge, is a troubled genius, the son of a once prosperous landowning family, a poet of fiery language and tempestuous passions. Yet his life is hampered by convention and by the austere and God-fearing mother with whom he lives. Scarred by a childhood of loneliness and severity he has long been ill, but he loves to walk the wild places of Ireland. The affair, sternly opposed by friends and family, is turbulent, sometimes cruel, often tender. Many years later, an old woman makes her way across London on the morning after a hurricane. Christmas is coming. As she wanders past bombsites and through the city's forlorn beauty, a snowdrift of memories and lost desires seems to swirl. She has twice been married: once widowed, once divorced, but an unquenchable passion for life has kept her afloat as her dazzling career has faded. A story of love's commitment, of partings and reconciliations, of the courage involved in living on nobody else's terms, Ghost Light is a profoundly moving and ultimately uplifting novel.

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