Winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2006. Now in paperback this Man Booker shortlisted novel follows five years in the life of Henry James directly after his play ‘Guy Domville” flopped on the London stage. An intelligent and moving read.
Born into one of America's first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War, Henry James left his country and lived in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among the artists and writers of the day. In stunningly resonant prose, TóibÃn captures vividly nineteenth-century European landscapes and the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.
TóibÃn is a great and humanizing writer who describes complex relationships in supple, beautifully modulated prose ( The Washington Post Book World ). In The Master , he has written his most ambitious and heartbreaking novel, an extraordinarily inventive encounter with a character at the cusp of the modern age, elusive to his own friends and even family, yet astonishingly vivid and moving here.
‘This is an audacious, profound, and wonderfully intelligent book. Guardian
Author
About Colm Toibin
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy in 1955. He is the author of eight novels including Blackwater Lightship, The Master and The Testament of Mary, all three of which were nominated for the Booker Prize, with The Master also winning the IMPAC Award, and Brooklyn, which won the Costa Novel Award. He has also published two collections of stories and many works of non-fiction. His most recent novel is Nora Webster. He lives in Dublin.
