Hallelujah Now - Terence Davies

Hallelujah Now by Terence Davies / ISBN 9798986446370 / a 191-page hardback, 6 x 8 inches, published in 2025 by Film Desk Books

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Filmmaker Terence Davies’s only published novel. Includes a selection of Davies’s original poetry, much of it never before published, along with an introduction by Michael Koresky and an afterword by James Dowling.

“Hallelujah Now fearlessly uses the novel form to give voice to anxieties that might have been otherwise unportrayable. Many artists who work in other mediums carry literary aspirations; few pull it off with such provocation and undaunted individuality. Davies’s cinema had no comparison, it was a subgenre unto itself, and similarly Davies’s novel feels like nothing less than a pure emanation of the self, beholden to nothing and no one else.” —Michael Koresky, from his introduction.

From Robert’s birth into a Catholic family in Liverpool, to his surreptitious sexual escapades and sadomasochistic fantasies, and his final, evocative journey to a nursing home, his life unfolds in a sensational and explicit stream of consciousness. Skillfully depicted in three sections, Hallelujah Now is a synthesis of memory, of vividly recaptured moments of childhood, of isolation, lust, and adventure. Time past and time present combine to paint a startling picture of a man fighting to accept his sexuality—and his mortality.