With a Preface by John Berger. I Could Read the Sky is a lyrical novel, a collaboration between the writer Timothy O'Grady and the photographer Steve Pyke. It tells the story of a man coming of age in the middle years of this century. Now, at its end, he find himself alone, struggling to make sense of a life of dislocation and loss. He remembers his childhood in the west of Ireland and his decades of bewildered exile in the factories, potato fields, and building sites of England. He is haunted by the faces of the family he left behind, and by the land that is still within him. He remembers the country, the seascapes, and the bars, the music he played and the woman he loved.