Amongst women

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME

McGahern's 'masterpiece: the sort of book which you can give anyone of any age and know that they will be changed by it' (Colm Tóibín) by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel).

'A book that can be read in two hours, but will linger in the mind for decades.' Sunday Telegraph

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.

'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.' John Updike

'An overwhelming experience.' The Times

'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell

'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel .' Melvyn Bragg

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

One joke about the Irish War of independence is that several weeks' negotiations only reached the Middle Ages. McGahern's character Moran is an aging veteran of that war whose brooding on the past obscures his present. The novel is in form and style much like McGahern's first, The Barracks (1963). A male protagonist whose extreme state of mind could be called patrimania abuses the women who sustain him and refuses to acknowledge the obsolescence of his mind, body, and convictions. Such is Moran's obstinacy that he manages to traumatize his family by the mulish application of the ``family-that-prays-together-stays-together'' theory. McGahern's work vindicates obsession with the past and reexamination of fictional landscape by extracting new power from familiar predicaments. A most satisfying addition to a very distinguished body of work.-- John P. Harrington, Cooper Union, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A lyric lament for Ireland, McGahern's lovingly observed family drama is dominated by an almost pathetic paterfamilias. Gruff, blustering Michael Moran, former guerrilla hero in the Irish War of Independence, is a man ``in permanent opposition.'' Now a farmer, he vents his compulsion to dominate, his cold fury and sense of betrayal on his three teenage daughters. Yearning for approval but fearing his flare-ups, they periodically beat a path back to the farmhouse from London and Dublin, then take flight again, both proud and dependent. Moran's second wife, Rose, much younger than he, displays saintly patience in her attempts to heal this splintering family. Moran also claims a renegade son in London who is ``turning himself into a sort of Englishman,'' and another son driven away by Moran's threats of beatings. McGahern ( The Dark ; The Pornographer ) has crafted a wise and tender novel whose brooding hero seems emblematic of an Ireland that drives away its sons and daughters. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

McGahern is one of the most highly regarded contemporary Irish fiction writers, and anyone who picks up his latest novel will immediately understand why. It's an uncompromising yet ironically endearing tale of a curmudgeon--Michael Moran by name. "Daddy is old now," say his daughters to each other, and he is a frustrated, angry oldster. Back in his prime he fought the British in Ireland's war for independence; in his dotage he now fights with his wife and daughters, who, despite the abuse he heaps on them, continue to feel it is their job to give the old guy positive stimulation. Oddly enough, regardless of Michael's inability to reconcile past and present, to let himself show and be shown love, he remains the core of his wife's and daughters' existences--a fact that most poignantly comes home to them upon his death. This is not a novel of plot, but one of character, of psychology. And McGahern, in a style at once tough and lustrous, beguilingly insinuates a comprehension of Michael's fears and will. --Brad Hooper

Kirkus Book Review

McGahern (High Ground, 1987; The Pornographer, 1979, etc.) writes a very pregnant novel, usually with one splendidly truthful germ as well as the capability to sensitively echo its close surroundings. But the actual book he delivers tends to be somewhat disappointing, somewhat limp and not fully realized. That's the case here too--with a family portrait of old man Moran, a hero in the Irish Independence war who has steadfastly refused his pension in disgust at how the country turned out. Moran, a farmer, has a large family--three daughters and two sons--and as the book begins ia taking a second wife, Rose. Rose holds her own in the family, remarkably--for what family is to Moran is a fastness, a fort, a place in which to hide. The daughters especially suffer this insistence on the family as withdrawal mechanism--and when the boys test it, they soon are banished altogether. The title here, however, is somewhat misleading (and the book bears no resemblance except in title to Cesare Pavese's great Italian novel), for the story is clearer about its main character, Moran, through the eyes of the sons than of the daughters. McGahern writes intimately of their lives, but there's a muzziness to many of his sentences that makes the women indistinct as well. Well-intentioned, quite artful work--with less of a strong, solid core than is satisfying. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.