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.

Synopsis

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, Tóibín 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.

Tóibín 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.

Reviews

‘This is an audacious, profound, and wonderfully intelligent book.
Guardian

About the Author

Colm Toibin was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in the southeast of Ireland in 1955. Three of his grandparents were born in the town or close to the town. One great-grandfather owned Whelan's, or Whaelan's, public house (since demolished)on the Island Road; another great- grandfather worked as a stonemason in the town; another was a small farmer outside the town; the fourth great- grandfather was a farmer near Tullow in County Carlow. His grandfather Patrick Tobin was a member of the IRB, as was his grand-uncle Michael Tobin. Patrick Tobin took part in the 1916 Rebellion in Enniscorthy and was subsequently interned in Frongach in Wales. (See 'The Rising' by Bairbre Toibin; see also 'Frongoch' by ; see also 'The Easter Week Rising in Enniscorthy' by Henry Goff in 'Enniscorthy 2000', published by St Senan's Parish to mark the advent of the third millenium in Enniscorthy.) His uncle Padraig Toibin, who died in 1995, worked as a journalist on the local newspaper The Enniscorthy Echo. He fought in the War of Independence and on the Republican side in the Civil War. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation