"The novelist's art at its finest ... Beats to the rhythm of the world and of life itself." -John Banville, The New York Review of Books
Michael Moran is an embittered Irish Republican who detests the "small-minded gangsters" who now run the country for whose independence he fought. Now a soldier without a battle, he transfers his brutality to his own family. With his daughters he is stern and uncompromising Maggie, a late bloomer who wants to study nursing; Sheila, an assertive spirit whose chance at a university scholarship is thwarted by Moran; and the hardworking Mona, who settles for the civil-service career Moran chooses for her. But it is his sons--the errant Luke and the youngest, Michael--who must endure his malevolence as their father's struggle with the past comes to an unimagined end.
"McGahern's telling is masterful. With clarity and lyrical language, he soothes and sears the reader." - Detroit Free Press
"A wonderful writer ... his spare but luminous prose evokes a severely repressed life and the aching passion that lies beneath its stony surface."- Chicago Tribune
