Book description
'As wise and compelling a book as any of his elegiac and graceful
novels.' David Mitchell This is the story of John McGahern's
childhood; of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement,
and his own discovery of literature. 'Long before Frank McCourt made
an entire industry out of twinkly eyed accounts of the poverty and
institutionalised brutality of mid-twentieth-century rural Ireland,
John McGahern, Ireland's greatest living novelist, had already shone
wise and unsparing light on this same world ... Memoir is the full,
unadorned story of his childhood and adolescence in Leitrim ... His
finest book yet.' Stephanie Merritt, Observer 'In a tremendously
distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a
sharper eye.' Andrew Motion, Guardian 'I have admired, even loved,
John McGahern's work since his first novel ... Memoir strips the skin
off his fiction as he faces a desperate early life with great force
and tenderness.' Melvyn Bragg
John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and brought up in the
Republic of Ireland. He trained to be a primary-school teacher before
becoming a full-time writer, and later taught and travelled
extensively. He lived in County Leitrim. The author of six highly
acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories, he was the
recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Society of
Authors Travelling Scholarship, the American-Irish Award, the Prix
Etrangère Ecureuil and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres. Amongst Women, which 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 appeared in numerous anthologies and
has been translated into many languages. In 2005, his autobiography,
Memoir, won the South Bank Literature Award. John McGahern died in 2006.
