Irish Fiction

This collection of short stories encounters humour and confrontation of young and old in ‘Short Back and Sides’, ‘The Temptation of Adam’ and ‘Grumpy Kelly’. Here the characters go through the journey of growing up and facing life in denial in old age.

McGahern's command of the short story places him among the finest practitioners of the form, in a lineage that runs from Chekhov through Joyce and the Anglo-American masters.

Stories by one of the outstanding Irish writers of today, author of Nightlines, The Barracks, The Dark, The Leavetaking, The Pornographer, High Ground, Amongst Women (nominated for the Booker Prize in 1990) and That They May Face the Rising Sun.

The stories in High Ground are set in ordinary places, in the streets and suburbs and dancehalls of Dublin, the small towns and fields of the midlands, the big houses of the beleaguered Anglo-Irish in the aftermath of their ascendancy, the whole changing country propelled in a generation from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century.

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, threatened by illness, seems to be losing the last vestiges of its purpose.

A novel about adolescence and a guilty, yet uncontrollable sexuality that is contorted and twisted by both puritanical state religion and a strange, powerful and ambiguous relationship between son and widower father.

A day, crucial and cathartic, in the life of a young Catholic schoolteacher who has returned to Ireland after a year's sabbatical in London where he married an American divorcee.

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

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.

Three brothers travel west from Dublin to Gloria Bog, the heart of the territory where so many of McGahern's stories take place, to attend the funeral of their uncle. Depicting the customs and rituals of the day, McGahern exquisitely traces how the brothers react to the area in unexpected and tender ways, and face their own feelings about the transience of life.

Moran is an old Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerilla leader in the War of Independence. Now, in old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past.

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.