Brian Moore
Brian Moore was born in Belfast in 1921. He served with the British Ministry of War Transport during World War Two and emigrated to Canada in 1948 where he became a journalist. His first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, was published in 1955.
Moore moved to the USA in 1959 and published 20 internationally acclaimed novels. Brian Moore died in 1999.
Marie Davenport plans to leave her husband but before she can do so, he dies while they are on holiday in France. The next day Marie is told that his body has disappeared from the hospital morgue. Returning to their hotel, she discovers that his clothes, passport and plane ticket are also gone.
‘Extraordinary… such an absorbing story that we take the miraculous in our stride.’ – Daily Telegraph
Marie follows the trail of her dead husband to Nice, then onwards to New York and, finally, to California where Marie must confront the limits of what she believes.
Cold Heaven shows Moore’s mastery of narrative and suspense, it is a compulsively readable story of a modern-day miracle amid the emotional turbulence of a marriage.
‘Striking and strange, Cold Heaven is told with the panicky sense of urgency at which Moore excels.’ – Observer
Diarmuid Devine is a teacher, and bachelor, destined for a lifetime of loneliness. One day he overhears a colleague mocking his sexual inexperience then he meets Una and a possible future appears.
“The most adult love story I have read for years.” – Sunday Express
Set in an oppressive Belfast, stifled by religion and the conformity it imposes, Brian Moore explores the innocence, misunderstanding and consequences of Devine’s relationship with Una until rejection and the fear of scandal forces him to choose how he will live the rest of his life.
“Brian Moore is a man of profound human insight as well as a master storyteller… the most subtle, most readable, least pushy of guides.” – Sunday Telegraph
During the Second World War, Gavin Burke defies his nationalist family to join the Air Raid Precautions unit in Belfast, his rebellion against the religion and politics of his father.
The War offers Gavin a new life, “war was freedom, freedom from futures”, and freedom from the suffocating society of his youth. He makes new friends, discovers poetry and new experiences. Then the War comes to Belfast and Gavin is thrown into a devastating air raid where he must prove himself if he is to escape his father’s world.
“His clean, lucid prose, his storytelling gift, his almost eerie ability to get inside the heads of his characters (men and women) and his courage in raising moral issues.”—Los Angeles Times
“The simple excellence of Brian Moore… accessible to everyone… by concentrating simply, directly and bravely on the primary sufferings and passions that everyone feels.”—New Statesman
In October 1970, as revolution spread around the world, the Front de Libération du Québec kidnapped James Cross, the British Trade Commissioner. As negotiations to free the hostage continued, Québec’s Vice-Premier was kidnapped and murdered. Brian Moore’s documentary novel recreates these events and asks: who were these young revolutionaries, what were their beliefs?
“Everything is here: the players, the issues, the time and place… Moore used his novelist’s gifts and his keen eye for tragedy to make sense of something that seemed… an impossible nightmare.”—The Globe and Mail
Brian Moore was in Montreal to investigate these events as they happened, interviewing those involved (from activists to politicians and police) and exploring the social and political background. In understanding the frustrations and radicalism of a group of Québec separatists, he finds parallels with his own past: “I found them to be young, ex-Catholic, nationalist… It was a mixture I had known back in Ireland.”
Brian Moore uses the techniques of fiction to provide insight into a new world, “in the theatre of confrontation, the curtain was going up.”
