About the Book
Shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award 2021
'The Blind Light reads like a British Don DeLillo, telling the social history of Britain through two generations of a family.' - Alex Preston, Observer
'A powerful and affecting novel' - Jim Crace, author of Harvest
In the late 1950s, during his National Service, Drummond meets the two people who will change his life: Carter, a rich, educated young man sent down from Oxford; and Gwen, a barmaid with whom he feels an instant connection. His feelings for both will be tested at a military base known as Doom Town - a training ground where servicemen prepare for the aftermath of an Atomic Strike. It is an experience that will colour the rest of his - and his family's - life.
Told from the perspectives of Drum and Gwen, and later their children Nathan and Anneka, The Blind Light moves from the Fifties through to the present day, taking in the global and local events that will shape and define them all. From the Cuban Missile Crisis to the War on Terror, from the Dagenham strikes to Foot and Mouth, from Skiffle to Rave, we see a family come together, driven apart, fracture and reform - as the pressure of the past is brought, sometimes violently, to bear on the present.
The Blind Light is a powerful, ambitious, big yet intimate story of our national past and a brilliant evocation of a family and a country. It will remind you how complicated human history is - and how hard it is to do the right thing for the right reasons.
About the Author :
Stuart Evers' debut, Ten Stories About Smoking, won the London Book Award in 2011; his highly acclaimed novel, If This is Home, followed in 2012 and his collection Your Father Sends His Love, was shortlisted for the 2016 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. In 2017, Evers won the Eccles British Library Writer's Award - one of Europe's richest prizes for a work in progress. His work has appeared in three editions of the Best British Short Stories, as well as Granta, the White Review, Prospect and on Radio 4. Originally from the North West, he lives in London.
Review :
From the cold war era to the war on terror, the corrosive effects of fear are closely observed in this portrait of a friendship over six decades . . . At its heart, the novel is a thoughtful and powerful study of the corrosive effects of fear, the damage we do to ourselves and our loved ones when danger is all we can see. Right now that story feels disconcertingly timely
The Blind Light reads like a British Don DeLillo, telling the social history of Britain through two generations of a family.
The Blind Light is a page-perfect and impeccably structured portrait of Britain’s troubled, post-nuclear generations, and the pressures which have both tugged them apart and cemented them together. Stuart Evers has written a powerful and affecting novel which excels at being as true to Family and the personal as it is to Nation and the universal, a rare and potent combination.
One is taken both by the breadth of vision and the depth of character on offer in Stuart Evers' stunning The Blind Light. Rarely does a novel of this scope sing with such brio at the level of the sentence while searing so emphatically in the region of the heart. This is an achievement to be admired and, frankly, envied. My hat is off.
A thoroughly absorbing novel which illuminates the nature of friendship and family while offering a compelling portrait of Britain. I loved it.
Extraordinarily intense, and intensely well written, the echoes of our current situation are uncomfortably close at hand. A complex and powerful novel.
A social history told through 2 generations of the same family. Beautiful & funny & moving. And a hugely hopeful read for our strange new world.
Evers’s book is a widescreen family saga that examines, among other things, the effect of the nuclear threat during the Cold War on the British psyche . . . The narrative splinters to follow a range of stories against a smoothly unscrolling backdrop of Britain down the decades . . . Evers’s style channels the repetitive rhythms of David Peace, while seeking the sweep of Alan Hollinghurst . . . it’s absorbing – and uncannily timed in its perversely consoling sense of how crises come and go.
The Blind Light is staged on a far grander scale than its predecessor. Real-life books, TV programmes and songs are threaded through the storyline in a double-layering of fiction and reality. Historical events form the backdrop to the action, from 1970s industrial action to the July 7 terrorist bombings in London in 2005. Submerged currents from the cold war guide the plotline . . . Lyrical but precise descriptions abound — the ‘golden caul’ of a candle, the ‘precarious balance of the inherited and the acquired’ in the hallway furnishings of Carter’s family home. ‘The words sounding fine, unslurred, unhurried, not too glassy’ is the perfectly tuned evocation of a drunk trying to speak clearly. These are the moments when The Blind Light shines most brightly.
This extraordinary novel about Britain and Britishness spans six decades and uses the stories of two men and their families to delve revealingly into complex questions of class, fate and history
A sprawling, absorbing, epic crossing generations
Atmospheric . . . powerfully imagined . . . [Evers’s] skill in The Blind Light, as in his earlier work, is to see the skull beneath the skin of tough, regular, often lonely lives . . . And to write their inner lives with an intimacy and spartan tenderness that in the contemporary British novel feel rare
Evers excels in his close examination of relationships . . . Mental ill health is sensitively treated by Evers and the complicated nature of guilt and loss is beautifully handled . . . it is an absorbing read. Exploring the corrosive effects of living in fear, the book takes in 20th-century events from the Dagenham Strikes to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from the Cold War to Trump. Although written before the Covid-19 pandemic, it has much of worth to say about our present predicament.
