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.