Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2008.
Costa Book Awards 2008 Judges' comment: "The voices in this film noir poem - confident, seductive and hypnotic - draw the reader into a tragic, complex and dream-like love story."
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
| Other Genres: |
Win a Copy of The Sisters of Hope Square by Faith Hogan and a Bucket List Scratch Book
Closing date: 04/07/2026
Shortly after a man and a woman meet for the first time in a second-hand clothes shop in Belfast, a bomb goes off. It is some time in the 1970s. They become lovers. For All We Know is their story, told in the recent past: a meditation on love, place, memory, loss and language, how people know each other, misunderstand each other, or translate each other, not to mention the events and circumstances which are beyond their control.
Gesturing towards a conventional sonnet sequence – the poems consist of fourteen lines, or multiples thereof, in lines of fourteen syllables – Ciaran Carson’s novelistic book also references film noir, Cold War thriller, fairy story, and the art of the fugue. In its uncanny music, repercussions and reprises, its mysterious unfolding of what happened or what might have been in Paris and Dresden (or was it Berlin?), For All We Know is a sequence of poems like nothing you’ve ever read before.
For All We Know features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Poetry, General Fiction, Fiction, Biography, Literature and Literary studies
For All We Know is available in Paperback
For All We Know was written by Ciaran Carson and published by The Gallery Press
