Book description
It is December in Belfast, Christmas is approaching and three sets of
people are about to make their way to Amsterdam.
Alan, a university art teacher stands watching the grey sky blacken
waiting for George Best's funeral cortege to pass. He will go to
Amsterdam to see Bob Dylan in concert but also in the aftermath of his
divorce, in the hope that the city which once welcomed him as a young
man and seemed to promise a better future, will reignite those
sustaining memories. He doesn't yet know that his troubled teenage son
Jack will accompany his pilgrimage.
Karen is a single mother struggling to make ends meet by working in a
care home and cleaning city centre offices. She is determined to give
her daughter the best wedding that she can. But as she boards the plane
with her daughter's hen party she will soon be shocked into questioning
where her life of sacrifices has brought her.
Meanwhile middle-aged couple, Marion and Richard are taking a break from
running their garden centre to celebrate Marion's birthday. In
Amsterdam, Marion's anxieties and insecurities about age, desire and
motherhood come to the surface and lead her to make a decision that
threatens to change the course of her marriage.
As these people brush against each other in the squares, museums and
parks of Amsterdam, their lives are transfigured as they encounter the
complexities of love in a city that challenges what has gone before.
Tender and humane, and elevating the ordinary to something timeless and
important, The Light of Amsterdam
is a novel of compassion and rare dignity. Like Jane Austen and EM
Forster, Park sets his characters a moral examination ... Park never
forgets that he is telling a story - or rather, several stories - but
his method is dramatic ... The Light of Amsterdam
is a very good novel indeed David Park has written seven books, most
recently the hugely acclaimed The Truth Commissioner
. He was the winner of the Authors Club First Novel Award, the Bass
Ireland Arts Award for Literature and three-times winner of the
University of Ulster s McCrea Literary Award. He has twice been
shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award. He lives in County
Down, Northern Ireland with his wife and two children.
