High Ground - Hardcover

McGahern, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670811815 ISBN 13: 9780670811816

Publisher: The Viking Press, 1987

Synopsis

Set in Dublin, in the small towns and fields of the midlands, and the big houses of the Anglo-Irish, these ten stories explore the painful changes in ordinary lives as Ireland is propelled into the late twentieth century

About this title

About the Author

John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and brought up in the West of Ireland. He is a graduate of University College, Dublin. He has worked as a Primary School teacher and has held various academic posts at universities in Britain, Ireland and America.In the opinion of the Observer, John McGahern is 'Ireland's greatest living novelist'. He is the author of six highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship, the American-Irish Award, the Prix Etrang re Ecureuil and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Amongst Women, which has won both the GPA and the Irish Times Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a four-part BBC television series. His work has appeared in anthologies and has been translated into many languages.John McGahern lives in County Leitrim, Ireland.

From Publishers Weekly

The prevailing tone in this modest collection of stories by the Irish novelist is civil, deliberately subdued, even slightly depressed, warily watchful of a world of which not much can be expected. In the title story, a young man is offered a desirable academic appointment by a devious politician at the expense of a beloved old teacher who would be ousted to make way for his successor. Whether he will accept the tainted offer is the moral conundrum of the tale, a subtle one undercut by some awkward narrative devices and an ending that is essentially a trick, a facile shortcut. In the final story, the love of a young American visitor in Dublin and a middle-aged lawyer is a little too effortless, too easily achieved. But the author's strength lies not in the portrayal of love won but in setting an atmospheregray, bleak, drizzlyof loss, desolation. That, the stories seem to say, is how life goes, on both the high ground and in the low-lying, boggy terrain of modern Ireland.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Viking Press
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0670811815
• ISBN 13: 9780670811816
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 156