Fighting with Shadows Or, Sciamachy (Dalkey Archive Press)

Fighting with Shadows tells of violently sundered geographical borders, of maddening religious differences, of the anguished gaps between people as they struggle to find each other, and of how the dead reside among its inhabitants long after they've passed. The imagination's encounter with reality registers Dermot Healey's relentless fascination with the way things are seen and with the things themselves, or the "erotica of little things." A realist account and nightmarish fable, Fighting with Shadows is critical to the history of modern Irish fiction.