I Could Read the Sky

What a beautiful book. First published in 1997 and reimagined and republished this year with the cooperation of its two authors, it brings together story and photos to much the same hauntingly evocative effect as John Berger and Jean Mohr's A Fortunate Man (one of my favorite Phinney by Post picks), in this case pairing Pyke's photographs of Ireland and Irish people with O'Grady's novel of the often brutal, but not unjoyous, life of an Irish migrant laboring in England. O'Grady's story is individual—particular labors, a particular love, particular sadness—but made collective by its spare language, its sense of fellow feeling with other migrant workers, and most of all by Pyke's photos, portraits both individual and collective of joy, weariness, hope, and perseverance. I imagine reading this many times, each time letting the words or the pictures take the lead and then returning to the other.