On the day that Minister Peters boards a train from South Carolina heading north, he has nothing left but ghosts: the ghost of his murdered wife, the ghost of his drowned daughter, the ghosts of his father and his grandmother, and the people who disappeared from his town without trace or explanation. In the cramped car, Minister finds himself in close quarters with three passengers also joining the exodus from the South--people seeking a new life,...

"Alice Diamond, the Queen of the Forty Thieves, rules over her gang of hoisters with a bejewelled fist. Nell is a slum girl from Waterloo, hiding a secret pregnancy and facing a desperately uncertain future. Sensing an opportunity to exploit Nell's vulnerabilities, Alice takes her under her wing and, before long, Nell is experiencing the secret world of hoisting, with all the dangers - and glamorous trappings - that comes with this underworld existence....

"The Derry of poet Seamus Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark is a perilous place. Ghosts haunt the stairwells of apartment buildings, a curse follows two families down through the generations, close friends turn out to be police informers and the police are as likely to persecute an innocent man as protect him. And hovering over all the violence, poverty and despair of 1940s Northern Ireland is the spectre of the "Troubles". The hero of the...