I Could Read The Sky tells of one man's journey from the West of Ireland to the fields and boxing-booths and building sites of England. Now, at the century's end, he finds himself alone, looking back, struggling to make sense of a life of unforgotten loveliness and loss. Exploring themes of love, dislocation and yearning, with stark, clear prose and stunning photographs, this novel explores the experience of Irish emigration as never before.

An elderly Pole sits in a cafe in Krakow. At another table a young man with a ravaged face is drinking wine and reading Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy. They begin to talk. All through the night as they go from bar to bar the young man tells the story of the great love of his life, of how in the midst of their rapture the woman inexplicably disappeared, and of how he is now driving across Europe in a desperate attempt to find her. After they part in the pre-dawn light the old man returns to his rooms and finds himself beset by questions. Why can he not forget this young man? Who was the woman he was with and why did she leave him? These questions lead him back through his own life, from pre- and post-war Poland, to his membership of the Communist Party and his own life-altering love affair with a woman he met in Berlin and then ran away with to the sand dunes of the Baltic coast until she, too, left him without explanation. Through the years that followed he wandered...