I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, success and failure, fame and slaughter, to have read in the newspapers that as a writer I was past my sell-by date, yet regardless, to go on writing and reading, to be lucky enough to live in these two intensities that have buttressed my whole life.

When a man who calls himself a faith healer arrives in a small, west-coast Irish village, the community is soon under the spell of this charismatic stranger from the Balkans. One woman in particular, Fidelma McBride, becomes enthralled in a fatal attraction that leads to unimaginable consequences.

Edna O'Brien's classic, rocket of a novel, 'Night', is narrated by one of her most memorably, unhinged characters, Mary Hooligan. Lying on a four-poster bed, unable to sleep, she recounts (mis)adventures, courtships, and sexual encounters of the most transgressive kind, in a narrative voice of blistering originality.

Spanning five decades of writing, 'The Love Object' takes the most memorable and successful stories from collections like 'A Scandalous Woman' and 'Saints and Sinners'; stories that have bewitched generation after generation. Here you will find stories about families, feuds, love and land, enchantment, disenchantment, and throughout, the manifold bonds of love.