Five days of glorious gothic alchemy and evil . . . An atmospheric, page-turning and powerful novel of sorcery and desperate magic by award-winning author Marcus Sedgwick. Shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction prize and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. The days between 27 December and New Year's Eve are dead days - days when spirits roam and magic shifts restlessly just beneath the surface of our everyday lives. There is a man, Valerian, whose time is running out. He must pay the price for the pact he made with evil so many years ago. His servant is Boy, a child with no name and no past - a child he treats with contempt, but who serves his master well and finds solace in the company of his only friend, Willow. Unknown to any of them, it is Boy who holds the key to their destiny. Set in dark, threatening cities and the frozen countryside in a distant time, THE BOOK OF DEAD DAYS conjures a spell-binding story as Valerian, Boy and Willow battle to stop time and cling to life.

Let me tell you a story of To-Day, - very homely and narrow in its scope and aim. Not of the To-Day whose significance in the history of humanity only those shall read who will live when you and I are dead. We can bear the pain in silence, if our hearts are strong enough, while the nations of the earth stand afar off. I have no word of this To-Day to speak. I write from the border of the battlefield, and I find in it no theme for shallow argument or flimsy rhymes. The shadow of death has fallen on us; it chills the very heaven. No child laughs in my face as I pass down the street. Men have forgotten to hope, forgotten to pray; only in the bitterness of endurance, they say "in the morning, `Would God it were even!' and in the evening, `Would God it were morning!'" Neither I nor you have the prophet's vision to see the age as its meaning stands written before God. Those who shall live when we are dead may tell their children, perhaps, how, out of anguish and darkness such as the world seldom has borne, the enduring morning evolved of the true world and the true man. It is not clear to us. Hands wet with a brother's blood for the Right, a slavery of intolerance, the hackneyed cant of men, or the blood-thirstiness of women, utter no prophecy to us of the great To-Morrow of content and right that holds the world.

John McGahern's work is not easily conceived of as belatedly modernist. His memorialising, faintly archaic style implies a concern with 'making it old' rather than new, suggesting the symptomatic diffidence of many who wrote in the wake of modernism. Nevertheless, McGahern's statements about the 'presence' of words and the hard-won impersonality of the artwork point to a covert engagement with modernist aesthetics. Offering intertextual interpretations of McGahern's six novels, and of thematically grouped short stories, Richard Robinson reads McGahern's fiction alongside writing by Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Beckett, Nietzsche, Lawrence and Chekhov, amongst others. Drawing out the ways in which McGahern's fiction conceals and reveals its modernist traces, this study considers subjects such as 'low' modernism, the complexity of McGahern's time-writing and his dialectical construction of the relationship between cultural tradition and modernity in Ireland. McGahern's narratives of melancholic return are often read psycho-biographically, but they also involve a return to the remnants of literature, including that of the modernist canon. This book will be of interest not only to McGahern scholars but also to those who contemplate the compromised legacies of literary modernism in late-twentieth century and contemporary writing.