These 34 funny, tragic, bracing, and acerbic stories represent the complete short fiction of one of Ireland's finest living writers. On struggling farms, in Dublin's rain-drenched streets, or in parched exile in Franco's Spain, McGahern's characters wage a confused but touching war against the facts of life.

With this magnificently assured new novel, John McGahern reminds us why he has been called the Irish Chekhov, as he guides readers into a village in rural Ireland and deftly, compassionately traces its natural rhythms and the inner lives of its people. Here are the Ruttledges, who have forsaken the glitter of London to raise sheep and cattle, gentle Jamesie Murphy, whose appetite for gossip both charms and intimidates his neighbors, handsome John Quinn, perennially on the look-out for a new wife, and the town s richest man, a gruff, self-made magnate known as the Shah.
Following his...

From award-winning author John McGahern, a memoir of his childhood in the Irish countryside and the beginnings of his life as a writer.McGahern describes his early years as one of seven children growing up in rural County Leitrim, a childhood was marked by his father's violent nature and the early death of his beloved mother. Tracing the memories of home through both people and place, McGahern details family life and the beginnings of a writing career that would take him far from home, and then back again. Haunting and illuminating, All Will Be Well is an unforgettable portrait of...

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within...

Elizabeth Reegan, after years of freedom - and loneliness - marries into the enclosed irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own; her husband is straining to break free from the servile security of the police force; and her own life, thr

A family story, told with restraint and tenderness. This book is a son's unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flow

A collection of short stories.

The stories in 'High Ground' are set in ordinary places - in the streets, suburbs and dancehalls of Dublin, the small towns and fields of the midlands and the big houses of the beleaguered Anglo-Irish in the aftermath of their ascendancy - whilst the whole changing country is propelled from the 19th into the late 20th century.

Michael, a writer of pornographic fiction, creates an ideal world of sex through his 2 stock athletes, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who falls in love with him.

A young Catholic schoolteacher has returned to Ireland after a year's sabbatical in London where he married a divorcee - as a result he now faces dismissal by the school authorities. Moving from the earliest memories of the couple, the novel recreates their breaking of the shackles of guilt into the acceptance of a fulfilling love.