Fighting with Shadows Or, Sciamachy

Initially published in 1984, Dermot Healy’s stunning first novel, Fighting with Shadows, returns to print after almost thirty years. Largely set in the border village of Fanacross, Co. Fermanagh, as Ireland stumbles clumsily toward modernity, the Allen family negotiate a bitter and troubled terrain. Fighting with Shadows offers extraordinary and poetic glimpses of the compelling lives of ordinary people. The novel’s landscape is of borderlands, of in-between spaces; it 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. At once realist account and nightmarish magic realist fable, Fighting with Shadows occupies a truly important position in the history of modern Irish fiction.

Dermot Healy (1947-2014) grew up in Cavan near the border with Northern Ireland. Following stints in London and Belfast, Healy settled in Ballyconnell, Co. Sligo, where he founded and edited the journal Force 10. His debut collection, Banished Misfortune and Other Stories (1982), was followed by four novels and an acclaimed memoir, The Bend for Home (1996). Healy also wrote five collections of poetry and thirteen stage plays (his Collected Plays will be published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2016). Elected to Aosdána in 1986, he was the recipient of two Hennessy Literary Awards, the Tom-Gallon Award, the Encore Award, and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Dermot Healy (1947-2014) grew up in Cavan near the border with Northern Ireland. Following stints in London and Belfast, Healy settled in Ballyconnell, Co. Sligo, where he founded and edited the journal Force 10. His debut collection, Banished Misfortune and Other Stories (1982), was followed by four novels and an acclaimed memoir, The Bend for Home (1996). Healy also wrote five collections of poetry and thirteen stage plays (his Collected Plays will be published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2016). Elected to Aosdána in 1986, he was the recipient of two Hennessy Literary Awards, the Tom-Gallon Award, the Encore Award, and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Neil Murphy teaches contemporary literature at NTU, Singapore. He is the author of Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt (2004) and editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (2010) and of the revised edition of Higgins’s Balcony of Europe (2010). He co-edited (with Keith Hopper) a special Flann O’Brien centenary issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (2011) and The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on contemporary fiction, Irish writing, and theories of reading, and is currently completing a book on John Banville. Keith Hopper teaches Literature and Film Studies at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, and is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. He is the author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (revised edition 2009), general editor of the twelve-volume Ireland into Film series (2001–7), and co-editor (with Neil Murphy and Ondřej Pilný) of a special “Neglected Irish Fiction” issue of Litteraria Pragensia (2013). He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and is currently completing a book on the writer and filmmaker Neil Jordan.