The Illumination

Suddenly all human pain manifests itself as light.

Oversimplifications aside, this is a book of beauty and measured mortality. The book collects the pain, grief and fears of death from a series of people who are suffering, their thoughts, hopes, dreams, self-delusions all contained in its simple mourning yearning pages.

There’s the simple review for this book, about how light shines out of injuries, out of pain centres and how this affects sufferers all over the country from a lonely divorcee to a leukemia sufferer to a boy who can see pain in inanimate objects.

There’s also the review that’s about the book’s tone, about its beauty, about how it will move you to tears with its masterful control of its high concept and slow effervescence of pace. This isn’t a book that lends itself to a synopsis-style review because it’s not so much what happens but how it happens. Brockmeier’s prose is filled with emotion, sympathy and a powerful understanding of what causes us pain and how we deal with it. Read this book, it will give you faith in literature, it will make you cry and it will make you smile through the tears. Simply put, one of this year’s finest.