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 characters through the course of a year, through lambing and haying seasons, market days and family visits, McGahern lays bare their passions and regrets, their uneasy relationship with the modern world, their ancient intimacy with death.
About the Author
Editorial Reviews
“This beautiful novel . . . bestows on the reader one of the principal gifts of fiction: that of having one's experience enlarged by a process of intense, almost resistless sympathy. Through intense concentration on the local, McGahern has again found a route to the universal.” –The Times Literary Supplement
“Deceptively wise. . . . Possesses the warm certainty of a writer who loves and respects every character . . . rascals and heroes alike, and who wants to deliver them to us in all their dimensions.” -The Boston Globe
“This great and moving novel, which looks so quiet and provincial, opens out through its small frame to our most troubling and essential questions.” –The Guardian
"This stately novel by one of Ireland's foremost writers is, as its title suggests, primarily about the rhythms and cadences of place. The story is an old one: in search of a quieter way of life, Joe and Kate Ruttledge have traded their careers in London for a farm near a small Irish village, where they learn how to raise sheep and are steadily drawn into the lives of their neighbors. There's the Shah, a rich bachelor in search of an heir for his business; John Quinn, a weaselly sexual predator, and a danger to women throughout the county; and Jimmy Joe McKiernan, an I.R.A. leader whose exploits periodically stir up high feeling. McGahern is never sentimental, and the novel's greatest pleasures come from the unflinching probity of his observations: he writes as crisply about the parsimony of a neighbor or sending lambs to be slaughtered as he does about the notion that happiness "should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all." –New Yorker
