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.

This volume brings together all of McGahern's surviving essays, reviews and speeches. In them his canon of great writers - Tolstoy, Chekhov, James, Proust and Joyce - is cited many times, with deep and subtle appreciation.

Joe and Kate Ruttledge have come to Ireland from London in search of a different life. In passages of beauty and truth, the drama of a year in their lives and those of the memorable characters that move about them unfolds through the action, the rituals of work, religious observances and play.

This remarkable volume brings together all of John McGahern's short fiction, fully revised, in a definitive text. McGahern has long been recognized as a contemporary master of the short story; The Collected Stories confirms his reputation as Ireland's leading prose writer.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.