Product Description

A disturbing exploration of the inevitability of life. Under Orion's stars, bluesilver visions torment Tom, Macey and Thomas as they struggle with age-old forces. Distanced from each other in time, and isolated from those they live among, they are yet inextricably bound together by the sacred power of the moon's axe and each seek their own refuge at Mow Cop. Can those they love so intensely keep them clinging to reality? Or is the future evermore destined to reflect the past?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38725 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
"A magnificently multilayered novel! and a superbly exciting piece of literature." The Times "!A work of poetic imagination that will keep any adult mind at full stretch." Daily Mail "A bitter, complex, brilliant book." Ursula Le Guin

About the Author
Alan Garner was born in Cheshire on 17th October 1934, and his childhood was spent in Alderley Edge, where his family has lived for more than four hundred years. He was awarded the OBE in 2001, for his services to literature.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful
I too read this story in school, many more years ago now than I want to remember. I was reading simple adventure stories and came across 'Red Shift' somehow and was completely captured by the pure imagination of it. Maybe the only novelist who comes close for me now to that sense of wonder and other worldliness is Robert Holdstock in his Mythago novels. But if you can put 'Red Shift' into the hands of a teenager at just the right time...... ....you will create a reader of books for a lifetime.

love will tear you apart
Red Shift would be the greatest children's book ever, if it wasn't really a dark and disturbing adult book subversively circulated to the young. Short of giving your kids "American Psycho" or "The 120 Days of Sodom", I can't think of a better way of messing with their heads. I read it (after the first 4 Garners) at 13, when I was smart enough to crack the code and too dumb to spot the sex, and it freaked me out, but not as much as when I re-read it five years later. There's three stories in one, plus bits of Vietnam, King Lear and the Ballad of Tamlyn, but its all really in Tom's over-intellectual, working-class, sexually-confused head as he tries to make sense of everything moving away from him. Along with "Unknown Pleasures" and "Closer", this is Cheshire's greatest contribution to world culture. Tom's a cold

A book like few others
I read this book when I was 14 - it was one of several that my English teacher recommended, not as part of the school curriculum, but because he thought they were good books (these were halcyon pre-National Curriculum days where teachers could often follow their own enthusiams, and thus build the same in others).

I cannot recall what else he recommded now, but Red Shift simply blew me away then, and continues to have an effect today - 30 years later.

My friend and I read it at the same time and discussed it endlessly. We were gripped by everything - the style, the story, the lack of a traditional narrative thread, the switch between times - and viewpoints, the meaning (if there was one).

Its not a perfect book - the Roman episodes do not work entirely well at times, and returning to it now its a bit dated - but that does not matter when you can be so gripped by the pace and drive of the book (I will not say "story" because that would imply a structure that it does not have - and it is that too that fascinates).

It changed the way I looked on writing, and the way I wrote (indeed maybe still write sometimes). The power of the short sentance, and well chosen words. The way in which the reader fills in the gaps to the extent that every reader probably reads a "different" book.

Red Shift is at its heart a teenage novel (indeed it was probably one the first books aimed at the teenage market, an age group that - and it is hard to believe this now - was incredibly poorly provided for right up to the early 80s), and perhaps its only teenagers who appreciate the structural iconoclasm because many older readers hate it. I'd urge anyone to give it a go - relax and dive in. Let it flow over you. Emerge at the other end (its not a long book), think a bit, then dive in again... and find a whole different story each time.