In the Library
The Dead
James Joyce, 1914
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 16k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
At the top of the stairs, a woman pauses to listen to an old song drifting up from a room she has left, and her husband, watching from below, thinks he has never loved her more. The party is over: a triumph of roast goose and waltzes and clever talk, and Gabriel Conroy, who gave the dinner speech, is sure of his own warmth. Then, in their hotel room that night, Gretta tells him about Michael Furey, a boy in Galway who once stood in the cold rain beneath her window and was dead at seventeen, who loved her with a heat Gabriel has never once brought to anything. Joyce offers no rescue, only the slow, unbearable widening of a man learning that the great passion of his wife's life was never his. Outside, the snow keeps falling, faintly, through the whole dark universe, upon all the living and the dead.