Sometimes a book just finds you at the right moment. Like a friend returning from somewhere faraway, someone you thought you'd never see again. And that's often the case when you rediscover a book and return to it years later in a different time and place ad setting. I could Read the Sky by Timothy O'Grady is one such example of a book that has returned to me and found me at just the right time. Reading this book is like being fully alert and attuned on the soft grass of a field in summer looking up at the light in the sky. The words embrace you like sun from the blue sky. I read this little gem of a book years ago not long after it was first published, but over time (as you do) I duly forgot about it until this summer when it sort of came back into my head and I thought what was that book I read once - something to do about the sky? And so on a trip home to see my mum in Dublin this 'corona' July I had a look on the bookshelves in my old bedroom and sure enough there it was and I fished it out and brought it back with me to read it again and it now has pride of place in my studio and rightly so. I have to say I COULD READ THE SKY is probably the most beautiful and bittersweet novel I have read this year and probably for some time. It's short, a novella and comes with a portfolio of accompanying black and white photographs. An old Irish, emigrant man living on his own in England is looking back at his life with a mix of joy, laughter, sadness and regret from his time growing up in his home village of Labasheeda ('the bed of silk') in Ireland to the building sites and streets and smoky pubs of numerous English towns and cities where he laboured for years to the love that he eventually found one day in Kate Creevy. "When I lie in bed in the evening I think ever and ever of money and Kate Creevy."The prose sings, the sentences dance, they lilt and flow, at times slow then fast like the reels and ballads he spent his life like his father before him playing with flying fingers of skill on his accordian. This is not just a book, it's a piece of music singing with feelings of resignation, loneliness, great pride with a profound sense of place and a trembling recollection of moments long gone of sheer happiness. It's all the more powerful for being so taut, dense, short and for what it leaves out as for what it includes. I loved every page, every sentence (and every photograph) of this powerful, tragic, beautiful book.