A SECOND LIFE
OVERVIEW:
Following a car crash, for several seconds, Dublin photographer Sean Blake is clinically dead. He experiences the overwhelmingly powerful sensation of being drawn towards a blissful afterworld, to find his progress blocked by the haunting face of a man he only partially recognises. He plummets back to life into a world which, for him, has profoundly changed.
The pieces of his life seem not to fit anymore as he struggles, deeply traumatized, to adjust to this gift of a second life. Yet this is not the first time that he has been given a second life. At the age of six weeks he was taken from his mother, when as a young girl in rural Ireland, she was forced to give up her baby for adoption. Beginning the quest for his own identity, and struggling against a wall of official silence and a complex sense of guilt, Sean determines to find his natural mother, while continuing to search for the face that has haunted him since the crash. This leads him on a strange and absorbing journey through his various pasts, into archives, memories, dreams and startling confessions.
A Second Life, Dermot Bolger’s affecting new novel, is both an exploration of Ireland’s recent history and a poignant dissection of buried memories. Bolger takes us back to Ireland in the 1950’s, ‘another country’ where unmarried pregnant girls could be summarily dispatched to convents and a lifetime of drudgery, often never to be seen again. With his unique understanding of the way the past leaks through into the present, Bolger exposes a dark wound from Ireland’s history to shed light on a changing modern country, and explores how we must not only reclaim the past but try to redeem it.
As Sean closes in on the truth of his birth and upbringing, approaching at the same time a deeper knowledge of his marriage and relationship with his own children. A Second Life builds with a resonance that is both through-provoking and utterly compelling.
PRESS QUOTES:
“Audacious and moving... Bolger’s brilliant conflation of detective story, ghost hunt and history lesson is compulsive” – Aisling Foster in The Times
“I was more moved by this book than by anything I have read in a long time. It is utterly heartbreaking. For me it is Bolger’s finest work to date....remarkable in its sensitivity and tragic in its accuracy” – Madeleine Keane in the Sunday Independent.
“A master storyteller... A Second Life is absolutely splendid, sharp, observant, surprising, anarchic, funny and compelling... it’s a wonderful book. Read it” – Sean Rafferty on BBC Radio Ulster
“A marvellous, tortuous, multi-faceted, fascinating read...Ireland itself (its landscape, its tensions and generational conflicts) is brilliantly realized” – Tom Adair in Scotland on Sunday.
ISBN NO: 0140238794
PUB DETAILS: A Second Life was published by Penguin Books in 1992. It was published in Swedish as Ett Andra Liv (Albert Bonniers Forlag) and in Dutch as Een Tweede Leven (De Geus). It is now out of print and all rights are available
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