Shade

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We know from the earliest pages of Neil Jordan's numinous, slow-building fourth novel, Shade that its narrator, 50-old Nina Hardy, has been murdered with a pair of gardening shears by her childhood friend George Truite. The mystery is not who has committed this crime, but why. And although George has been for some years a resident of the local insane asylum, only recently allowed to experiment again with independent living, his madness is but a small part of the answer to that question. Set in Ireland near Drogheda, at the mouth of the river Boyne, Shade casts a wistful eye on childhood desires and alliances, and its lonely-girl-in-a-big-house beginnings will call to mind William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault . But like Jordan's greatest success, the film The Crying Game , this novel is full of surprises - and the biggest shocks are not always the most telling. - Jill Harvey