Red Sky in Morning
UK Publisher
Quercus (UKCxC), Europe
US Publisher
Little, Brown
Date Published
April 25th, 2013
Translations
Albin Michel (French).
Spring 1832: Donegal, north west Ireland. Coll Coyle wakes to a blood dawn and a day he does not want to face. The young father stands to lose everything on account of the cruel intentions of his landowner’s heedless son. Although reluctant, Coll sets out to confront his trouble. And so begins his fall from the rain-soaked, cloud-swirling Eden. Summer 1832: Duffy’s Cut, west of Philadelphia. After an epic voyage across the Atlantic, an emaciated Coll looks from hollowed eyes at the hill he and fifty-six other sick Irish immigrant workers must level to make way for the locomotive line. In front of him is a short life of backbreaking toil and personal regret. Behind him is John Faller – a man who has vowed to hunt Coll to the ends of the earth. Red Sky in Morning is a dark tale of oppression bathed in sparkling, unconstrained imagery. A compassionate and sensitive exploration of the merciless side of man and the indifference of nature, it is both a mesmerizing feat of imagination and a landmark piece of fiction.
Reviews
A cracking debut novel. Paul Lynch’s startling, evocative prose veers closer to poetry…. This novel is a wonderful achievement
- The Sunday Times
A compulsive read that may well become one of the hits of the summer.… a combination of the poetic and the vicious. It unabashedly uses a 21st-century sensibility to subvert the conventions of the ‘historical’ novel
- The Irish Times
A beautiful and frequently thrilling debut novel, stitched together in evocative language...
- The Sunday Business Post
'A startling debut debut that’s earning serious praise on both sides of the Atlantic...Paul Lynch’s Red Sky in Morning confronts the historical pretext to the Irish Famine with unparalleled lyricism and a strong sense of the elemental forces such times can evoke in people.'
'Another substantiation of the adage that the Irish can really, really write. If Dublin-based Lynch’s taut, absorbing, acerbically lyrical prose weren’t enough, there’s the intense and revelatory plot.'