The Dark

The celebrated second novel by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín) is 'a perfectly written tour de force' (Sunday Times) and 'the best novel to come out of Ireland in many years.' (Irish Times) Set in rural Ireland, John McGahern's second novel is about adolescence and a guilty, yet uncontrollable sexuality that is contorted and twisted by both puritanical state religion and a strange, powerful and ambiguous relationship between son and widower father. Against a background evoked with quiet mastery, McGahern explores with precision and tenderness a human situation, superficially very ordinary, but inwardly an agony of longing and despair. 'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell 'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg

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.'