The Mangan Inheritance - Hardcover

Moore, Brian

3.58

284 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374201943 ISBN 13: 9780374201944

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1979

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Thirty-six-year-old Jamie Mangan, an unsuccessful poet and sometime journalist, discovers that he may be descended from James Clarence Mangan, a drinkand drug-taking bohemian Irish poet of a century and a half ago, and sets out to investigate his ancestry

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From the Publisher:

'The Mangan Inheritance is a marvellous book. The storytelling is faultless and I have read no book recently that had in greater measure that quality for which no superior word need be sought but "unputdownability"... a superb product of the imagination.' - Paul Ableman, Spectator

'A passionately detailed and evocative work ... what's exceptionally good is the way it sustains the powerful, simple idea of the quest inside the worrying, edgy details of a modern life.' - Hermione Lee, Observer

'Brian Moore is a highly intelligent writer who has the enviable ability to make you want to go on turning the pages.' - A. N. Wilson, Evening Standard

'Moore is one of the boldest and most inventive contemporary novelists.' - Literary Review

About the Author:

Brian Moore (1921–1999) was born into a large, devoutly Catholic family in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father was a surgeon and lecturer, and his mother had been a nurse. Moore left Ireland during World War II and in 1948 moved to Canada, where he worked for the Montreal Gazette, married his first wife, and began to write potboilers under various pen names, as he would continue to do throughout the 1950s. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955, now available as an NYRB Classic), said to have been rejected by a dozen publishers, was the first book Moore published under his own name, and it was followed by nineteen subsequent novels written in a broad range of modes and styles, from the realistic to the historical to the quasi-fantastical, including The Luck of Ginger Coffey, An Answer from Limbo, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, I Am Mary Dunne, Catholics, Black Robe, and The Statement. Three novels—Lies of Silence, Color of Blood, and The Magician’s Wife—were short-listed for the Booker Prize, and The Great Victorian Collection won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. After adapting The Luck of Ginger Coffey for film in 1964, Moore moved to California to work on the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. He remained in Malibu for the rest of his life, remarrying there and teaching at UCLA for some fifteen years. Shortly before his death, Moore wrote, “There are those stateless wanderers who, finding the larger world into which they have stumbled vast, varied and exciting, become confused in their loyalties and lose their sense of home. I am one of those wanderers.”
Christopher Ricks teaches at Boston University and is a former president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. From 2004 to 2009 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound.

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