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Award-winning, Independent Bookshop in South Dublin

The Company of Books is an award-winning, independent bookshop in Ranelagh, Dublin 6. We stock an extensive range of fiction, non-fiction and children’s books which are available in the shop and on our site. 

Shadowy Third, The

XM835168PXG66
€13.99
Out of stock
1
Product Details
ISBN: 9780715654491
Author: Julia Parry
Format: Paperback

A sudden death in the family delivers Julia Parry a box of love letters. Dusty with age, they reveal an illicit affair between the celebrated Irish novelist, Elizabeth Bowen, and the academic Humphry House – Julia’s grandfather. So begins a life-changing quest to discover and understand this affair, one with profound repercussions for Julia’s family, not least her grandmother, Madeline.

Using fascinating unpublished correspondence, Julia follows the lives of three very different characters through some of the most dramatic decades of the twentieth century: from the rarefied air of Oxford in the 1930s and the Anglo-Irish Big House, to the last days of Empire in India and into the Second World War. The story opens up a lost world, one with complex and often surprising attitudes to love and sex, work and home, duty and ambition, and to writing itself, spiced throughout with social history and a celebrated supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf. Inspired by Bowen’s own obsession with place and memory, Julia travels to all the locations in the letters – from Kolkata to Cambridge; from Ireland to Texas weaving present-day storytelling with historical narrative and literary exploration.

From an assured, elegant new voice, The Shadowy Third is a beautifully written investigation of family, love, and the lasting power of literature.

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Awards

About The Company Of Books

The Company of Books opened at 96 Ranelagh Village in November 2009 and has been gathering good reviews and loyal customers since.  Country Finalist for Independent Bookshop of the Year 2021 (Booksellers Association) and Dublin Winner of An Post Bookshop of the Year.

We have an eclectic mix of fiction, non-fiction and children’s books offering something for everyone. Spot a review of a book you’d like to read? Contact us and if we don’t have it, we’ll order it for you.

We also sell book vouchers and a range of beautiful cards and stationery.

Independent bookshop
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