Shade » (Unabridged; 9 CDs, 10 hrs 45 mins)

Neil Jordan is the award-winning writer and director of such films as Mona Lisa, The End of the Affair, and The Crying Game, for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1993. He is also the author of three previous novels—The Past, The Dream of a Beast, and Sunrise with Sea Monster—and a short-story collection, Night in Tunisia.

Set in Ireland between the 1900s and 1950s, SHADE is a haunting novel of love and war. Beginning with a violent and mysterious murder, SHADE tells the story of two pairs of siblings growing up in Ireland in the first half of the century and how their lives interweave. Through a childhood that memory will give the luster of romance and the tragedy that comes as the children's innocence ends and the two boys leave for the Great War, these unforgettable characters reach mid-century inexorably moving towards playing roles in the brutal murder that begins the novel---a murder that may ultimately be revealed as the opposite of the senseless crime it seems.

The New Yorker

Jordan is best known as the director of “The Crying Game” and other films, but he started out as a fiction writer. His fourth novel is set on the banks of the River Boyne, in Ireland, and opens, in 1950, with a murder. The victim is Nina Hardy, a middle-aged actress, who has returned from America to live in the riverside mansion where she and her half brother grew up. The murderer (revealed at the outset) is a childhood friend who, along with his sister, lived on the opposite bank of the river. The first half of the novel tells the story of the quartet’s childhood friendship, an idyll that ends when the boys go off to fight in the First World War and Nina runs away to join an acting troupe. Jordan’s writing is atmospheric and filled with memorable images, but the second half of the novel, building toward the murder, sometimes feels perfunctory.