Jordan Neil

The first literary science fiction novel from Neil Jordan, visionary director of The Company of Wolves and Interview with the VampireIn a windswept corner of a forgotten peninsula, love and loss echo through the halls of a mansion built on secrets. Here memory is currency of the future, and the past refuses to stay buried. In the year 2084, Christian Cartwright, a quiet librarian at the enigmatic Huxley Institute, spends his days archiving the world’s most painful memories in the Library of Traumatic Memory. But when his lover Isolde dies in a mysterious car crash, Christian secretly resurrects her as a digital consciousness — an act of grief, obsession, and defiance. As Christian navigates a world where memories can be edited, dreams harvested, and the dead made to speak, he uncovers a deeper conspiracy buried in the Institute’s foundations — one that stretches back centuries to his 18th-century ancestor Montagu Cartwright, the architect of the Huxley Mansion. Montagu’s obsidian mirror and copper model may hold the key to a reality where architecture shapes fate and time loops back on itself. Blending gothic mystery, speculative science, and philosophical depth, The Library of Traumatic Memory is a haunting meditation on love, loss, and the ethics of memory. As the past and future collide, Christian must decide what it means to remember — and what it costs to forget.

THE LADY BEST BOOKS OF 2024A haunted record of a life devoted to the visual art of the cinema and the written word, by Ireland''s greatest director and one of her finest novelists.In this vivid, moving and strange memoir, Neil Jordan – the author of classic fiction like The Past, Sunrise with Sea Monster and Night in Tunisia, and the creator of celebrated movies like Angel, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire – reaches deep into his own past and that of his family.His mother was a painter, his father an inspector of schools who was visited by ghosts, and Jordan grew up on the edge of an abandoned aristocratic estate in north Dublin whose mysterious ruins fed his imagination. Passionate about music, he played in bands and theatre groups and met, at University College Dublin, a young radical called Jim Sheridan. Together they staged unforgettable dramatic productions that hinted at their future careers. His first collection of stories and first novel, Night in Tunisia and The Past, were met with acclaim, but Jordan was also drawn to the freedom and visual richness of film, and worked with the great English director John Boorman on his Arthurian epic Excalibur. His own first movie with Stephen Rea, Angel, was a brilliant angular take on the horrific violence of the Troubles, and in the years since then his films have combined in a unique way, intense supernatural elements with reflections on violence and sexuality. Jordan describes his work with Stephen Rea, Jaye Davidson, Bob Hoskins, Tom Cruise and many others, but this is not a conventional story of life in the movies. The book is an eerie meditation on loss, love and creativity, on inspiration and influence, by one of the most unusual artists Ireland has produced.

It looked like any other carnival, but of course it wasn't...It had its own little backstreets, its alleyways of hanging bulbs and ghost trains and Punch and Judy stands ...And at the end of one he saw the Hall of Mirrors. There were looping strings of carnival lights leading towards it, and a large sign in mirrored glass reading 'Burleigh's Amazing Hall of Mirrors' and the sign reflected the lights in all sorts of magically distorted ways. To Andy and his parents, it looks like any other carnival: creaking ghost train, rusty rollercoaster and circus performers. But of course it isn't. Drawn to the hall of mirrors, Andy enters and is hypnotised by the many selves staring back at him. Sometime later, one of those selves walks out rejoins his parents - leaving Andy trapped inside the glass, snatched from the tensions of his suburban home and transported to a world where the laws of gravity are meaningless and time performs acrobatic tricks. And now an identical stranger inhabits Andy's life, unsettling his mother with a curious blankness, as mysterious events start unfolding in their Irish coastal town...