The Country Funeral

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. 'My only concern', John McGahern once said, 'is that I get the sentence right and describe my world clearly and deeply.' 'The Country Funeral' witnesses three brothers, John, Philly and Fonsie Ryan, as they travel west from Dublin to Gloria Bog - the heart of the territory where so many of McGahern's stories take place - to attend the funeral of their uncle. Depicting the customs and rituals of the day, McGahern exquisitely traces how the brothers react to the area in unexpected and tender ways, and face their own feelings about the transience of life.

Born in 1934, John McGahern was the eldest of seven children, raised on a farm in the West of Ireland. The son of a Garda sergeant who had served as an IRA volunteer in the Irish War of Independence, he was devastated by his mother's death when he was nine. An outstanding student, McGahern studied at University College Dublin and became a teacher, but was dismissed when his controversial second novel, The Dark, was banned by the Irish Censorship Board. He moved to London to continue writing and met his future wife, Madeline Green, in 1967, with whom he remained until his death in 2006. The author of six acclaimed novels and four story collections, his novel Amongst Women, was shortlisted for the 1990 Booker Prize and made into a BBC TV series. McGahern held numerous academic posts internationally and was awarded honours including the Irish-American Foundation Award, an Irish PEN Award, the Prix Ecureuil de Littérature Etrangère and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. On his death in 2006, McGahern was celebrated by The Guardian as 'the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett.'