By the Lake - Hardcover

McGahern, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679419144 ISBN 13: 9780679419143

Publisher: Knopf, 2002

Synopsis

Widely considered to be the finest Irish writer of fiction at work today, John McGahern gives us a new novel that, with insight, humor, and deep sympathy, brings to vivid life the world and the people of a contemporary Irish village.

It is a village flirting with the more sophisticated trappings of modernity but steeped in the traditions of its unforgettable inhabitants and their lives. There are the Ruttledges, who came from London in search of a different life on the edge of the village lake; John Quinn, who will stop at nothing to ensure a flow of women through his life; Jimmy Joe McKiernan, head of the local IRA as well as town auctioneer and undertaker; the gentle Jamesie and his wife, Mary, who have never left the lake and who know about everything that ever stirred or moved there; Patrick Ryan, the builder who never quite finishes what he starts; Bill Evans, the farmhand whose orphaned childhood was marked with state-sanctioned cruelties and whose adulthood is marked by the scars; and the wealthiest man in town, known as the Shah.

A year in the lives of these and other characters unfolds through the richly observed rituals of work and play, of religious observance and annual festivals, and the details of the changing seasons, of the cycles of birth and death. With deceptive simplicity and eloquence, the author reveals the fundamental workings of human nature as it encounters the extraordinary trials and pleasures, terrors and beauty, of ordinary life.

By the Lake is John McGahern’s most ambitious, generous, and superbly realized novel yet.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"When I reviewed his Collected Stories (1992), I said that there was no finer writer in English today than McGahern. Such praise seems itself almost too conventional and genteel for the extraordinary and original achievement of [By the Lake]."
-Paul Binding, The Independent on Sunday, London

"Beyond its strong sense of place, and its realistic characters, this is a highly unconventional piece of fiction . . . One's overall reaction is astonishment at the sensitivity of the whole . . . This beautiful novel . . . bestows on the reader one of the principal gifts of fiction: that of having one's experience enlarged by a process of intense, almost resistless sympathy. Through intense concentration on the local, McGahern has again found a route to the universal."
-Robert MacFarlane, The Times Literary Supplement

'This is a book to surrender yourself to. If you give in to its measured ebb and flow, you will find yourself in [a] world in which the simplest objects . . . take on a quiet but magical luminosity."
-The Economist

"This great and moving novel, which looks so quiet and provincial, opens out through its small frame to our most troubling and essential questions."
-Hermione Lee, The Observer

"A superb, earthly pastoral . . . a knowing, quick-witted performance; a tale of chat, much gossip , a whiff of menace . . . McGahern, a supreme chronicler [of] the closing chapters of traditional Irish rural life, has created a novel that lives and breathes."
-Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

"When nature is rendered as vividly as this, it changes the character of fiction . . . McGahern has captured the ties of custom and affection that bind people to the land-and to each other."
-David Robson, Sunday Telegraph, London

McGahern has "an uncanny knack of homing in on the definitive moment, the illuminating detail."
-Patricia Craig, The Independent, London

"A strange and wonderful mixture of various genres . . . contained within a capacious style that has all the lucidity and intensity we have become accustomed to in McGahern, but inflected by a tone of forgiveness and acceptance that adds an amplitude and serenity rarely achieved in fiction . . . At last an Irish author has awakened from the nightmare of history and given us a sense of liberation which is not dependent on flight or emigration or escape."
-Seamus Deane, The Guardian

About the Author

John McGahern is the author of five highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories. His novel Amongst Women won the GPA Book Award and the Irish Times Award, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and was made into a four-part BBC television series. He has been a visiting professor at Colgate University and at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and is the recipient of the Society of Authors’ Award, the American-Irish Award, and the Prix Étrangère Ecureuil, among other awards and honors. His work has appeared in anthologies and has been translated into many languages. He lives in Dublin.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0679419144
• ISBN 13: 9780679419143
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352