I Could Read the Sky is a collaboration, in the shape of a lyrical novel, between writer Timothy O’Grady and photographer Steve Pyke. It tells the story of a man coming of age in the middle years of the last century.
Now at its end, he finds himself alone, struggling to make sense of a life of dislocation and loss. He remembers his childhood in the west of Ireland. The narrator spent decades of bewildered exile in the factories, potato fields, and on the building sites of England.
He is haunted by the faces of the family he left behind, and by the land that is still within him.
He remembers the country and the sea-scapes, the bars and the music he played and the woman he loved.
The preface is by well known novelist John Berger.