Creatures of the Earth
Published
January 2010
Publishers
UK
Faber & Faber
John McGahern is considered by many to be the most important Irish prose writer of the last fifty years. He is recognised as one of the great writers of our time. Hilary Mantel said that McGahern’s prose – ‘the vehicle for so much feeling’ – is ‘deceptively mild, careful, refined; his cadence is pure and never loses the rhythms of speech’.
McGahern’s short stories equal his finest novels, reflecting both the richness of the ordinary, and the extraordinary, in the lives of a variety of individuals: the jilted lover waiting with would-be writers in a Dublin pub on a summer evening: the bitter climax between a father and son as a marriage begins; the fortunes and misfortunes of the Kirkwood family; and many more.
For this revised edition completed shortly before his death, John McGahern edited and cut a number of stories from the Collected Stories that first appeared in 1992. This is the authorised edition of a modern classic.
McGahern’s short stories equal his finest novels, reflecting both the richness of the ordinary, and the extraordinary, in the lives of a variety of individuals: the jilted lover waiting with would-be writers in a Dublin pub on a summer evening: the bitter climax between a father and son as a marriage begins; the fortunes and misfortunes of the Kirkwood family; and many more.
For this revised edition completed shortly before his death, John McGahern edited and cut a number of stories from the Collected Stories that first appeared in 1992. This is the authorised edition of a modern classic.
