John McGahern Libros

Colum McCann once called Stoner one of the great forgotten novels of the past century, but it seems it is forgotten no longer - in 2013 translations of Stoner began appearing on bestseller lists across Europe. Forty-eight years after its first, quiet publication in the US, Stoner is finally finding the wide and devoted readership it deserves. Have you read it yet? William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.

This is the story of John McGahern's childhood; of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and his own discovery of literature and his ambition to become a writer. Memoir includes McGahern's memories of Dublin in the 1960s, his time as a schoolteacher, and his sacking for writing a banned book (his second novel, The Dark). It ends with his return to live in Leitrim with his wife and the death of his father, difficult to the last.

John McGahern is widely considered to be one of Ireland's greatest writers, with fans including John Updike, Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín and John Banville. Often hailed as his greatest work, Amongst Women is a poignant novel of family and togetherness.Once an officer in the Irish War for Independence, Moran is now a widower, eking out a living on a small farm where he raises his two sons and three daughters. Adrift from the structure and security of the military, he keeps control by binding his family close to him. But as his children grow older and seek independence, and as the passing years bring with them bewildering change, Moran struggles to find a balance between love and tyranny. 'A masterpiece . . . It is the sort of book which you can give anyone of any age and know that they will be changed by it.' Colm Tóibín

The Dark , widely acclaimed, yet infamously banned, is John McGahern’s sensitive, perceptive, and beautifully written portrayal of a young man’s coming-of-age in rural Ireland. Imaginative and introverted, the boy is successful in school, but bitterly confused by the guilt-inducing questions he endures from the priests who should be his venerated guides. His relationship with his bullying, bigoted, widowed father is similarly conflicted — touched with both deep love and carefully suppressed hatred. When he must leave home to further his education, their relationship is drawn to an emotional climax that teaches both father and son some of the most intricate truths about manhood.

This novel, McGahern's first, is a tragicomedy centred on a lonely woman who marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not hers, her husband is straining to escape the servile security of the police force, and her life seems to be losing all sense of purpose.

The Leavetaking recounts a young couple's struggle to overcome the suffocating influence of the church in order to find happiness in a fulfilling adult love.

Moran is an old Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerrilla 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. 'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth . . . a sight that cleanses us even as it saddens and frightens.' John Updike 'A book that can be read in two hours, but will linger in the mind for decades.' Sunday Telegraph

That They May Face the Rising Sun was the last novel from John McGahern, one of Ireland's greatest novelists. 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. We are introduced, with deceptive simplicity, to a complete representation of existence - an enclosed world has been transformed into an Everywhere.

The collected letters of John McGahern, 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett.' (Guardian)