Cold Eye of Heaven

Winner of the 2012 Kerry Group Irish Novel Award

The Cold Eye of Heaven: the stunning new novel from Christine Dwyer Hickey, bestselling author of Last Train from Liguria.



Farley is an elderly Irishman, frail in body but sharp as a tack. Waking in the middle of the night he finds himself lying paralyzed on the cold bathroom floor. And so his mind begins to move backwards, taking us with him into his past. As Farley unravels the warp and weft of his life, he relives the loves, losses and betrayals with the darkly comic wit of a true Dubliner. For this is also Dublin's story, the city Farley has seen through poverty and prosperity, boom and bust - each the other's constant companion throughout his seventy-five years.



Epic in scope, rich in detail, and shot through with black humour, The Cold Eye of Heaven is a bitter-sweet paean to Dublin and a unique meditation on the life of one of its citizens.



Christine Dwyer Hickey is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer. Twice winner of the Listowel Writers' Week short-story competition, she was also a prize winner in the prestigious Observer/Penguin short-story competition. Her bestselling novel Tatty was chosen as one of the 50 Irish Books of the Decade, longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award, for which her novel The Dancer was also shortlisted. Her most recent bestseller, Last Train from Liguria, was nominated for the Prix L'Européen de Littérature. She lives in Dublin.



This stunning novel has as its core the pulsing heart of love that drives the circulation of every being... Extraordinary



I simply didn't want it to reach its conclusion... Farley and the supporting characters in The Cold Eye of Heaven have moved into my head and I just don't have the heart to evict them.



Christine Dwyer Hickey's most achieved, taut and nuanced novel to date... Farley is a triumph.



The most profound novel I have read for years... As I finished reading, I turned to the first page and began to read again.