The Light of Amsterdam: A Novel

Front Cover
Bloomsbury Publishing USA, Nov 13, 2012 - Fiction - 371 pages

It is December; Christmas is approaching and the magic of one of Europe's most beautiful cities beckons. A father looks for himself in the past, struggling to deal with a recent divorce, his teenage son in tow. A single, selfless mother accompanies her only daughter and friends for a weekend-long bachelorette party. And a husband treats his wife to a birthday weekend away, somehow heightening her anxieties and insecurities about age, desire, and motherhood.

During their brief stay in the city, the confusions and contradictions inherent in their relationships assert themselves in unexpected ways, forcing each couple into a sometimes painful reassessment and a new awareness of the price that love demands. As these people brush against each other in the squares, museums, and parks of Amsterdam, their lives are transfigured in the winter light as they encounter the complexities of love in a city that challenges what has gone before. Tender and humane, elevating the ordinary to something timeless and important, The Light of Amsterdam is a novel of compassion and rare dignity.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
29
Section 3
55
Section 4
79
Section 5
87
Section 6
95
Section 7
110
Section 8
118
Section 14
217
Section 15
224
Section 16
232
Section 17
237
Section 18
253
Section 19
274
Section 20
299
Section 21
327

Section 9
120
Section 10
127
Section 11
137
Section 12
180
Section 13
208
Section 22
352
Section 23
373
Section 24
375
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About the author (2012)

David Park has written eight previous books including The Big Snow , Swallowing the Sun , The Truth Commissioner and, most recently, The Light of Amsterdam . He has won the Authors' Club First Novel Award, the Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature, the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the University of Ulster's McCrea Literary Award, three times. He has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and been shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award three times. In 2014 he was longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. He lives in County Down, Northern Ireland.

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