John McGahern

As Donal Gore awaits his execution in a Madrid prison during the Spanish Civil War, he is sustained by memories of setting fishing lines on the beach with his father back home in Ireland. Gradually, as he remembers, the events that brought him to a foreign cell emerge: the personal and political betrayals that are his heritage - and, it seems, his destiny. Released from prison by a German officer, who expects political intelligence in return, Donal returns to his windswept home on the Irish coast to find his once powerful father dramatically changed. The moving and magical heart of the novel explores the hopeless inability of Donal and his father to communicate with each other - until the father is literally beyond language. At the same time Nightlines centers on the poignant, intolerable triangular relationship that develops between father, son, and Rose, Donal's beautiful young stepmother.

Comes a Dark Stranger... Charming, picturesque Emberside Grange--where Isobel Penrose shared an idyllic life with her widowed father and Lydia, her vivacious older cousin. Then one day a tall, dark stranger invaded their lives. He called himself Simeon Graw. There was something disturbing about the gifted portrait artist in the flowing ebony cape. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, accompanied by a silent woman clad in black. Disturbing--and frightening. Suddenly Emberside became a place of terrifying night shadows. Lydia had vanished and Isobel, setting out in search of her, was propelled down a twisted road menaced by cloaked desires and sudden death--only to come full circle at Emberside, where she would discover the most shattering truth of all.

Elizabeth Regan, after years of freedom - and loneliness - marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own, and her husband is straining against his job in the police force. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, this is a novel of haunting power.

Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne [Fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe The lightning-rod man / Herman Melville The diamond lens / Fitzjames O'Brien The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte [Damned Thing]( / Ambrose Bierce The turn of the screw / Henry James The Hiltons' holiday / Sarah Orne Jewett The gift of the Magi / O. Henry The moving finger / Edith Wharton The open boat / Stephen Crane Lou, the prophet / Willa Cather The men of Forty Mile / Jack London Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald [A rose for Emily]( William Faulkner Big two-hearted river / Ernest Hemingway Flight / John Steinbeck

This remarkable volume brings together all of John McGahern's short fiction, fully revised, in a definitive text. McGahern has long been recognized as a contemporary master of the short story; The Collected Stories confirms his reputation as Ireland's leading prose writer.

This volume brings together all of McGahern's surviving essays, reviews and speeches. In them his canon of great writers - Tolstoy, Chekhov, James, Proust and Joyce - is cited many times, with deep and subtle appreciation.

The book "Power of Darkness" is an edition of twenty dark, mysterious stories. Each has its significance, perhaps in love, often in human terror and solitary endurance. From the love a man bears his dead wife and the misunderstanding that hinders his sight, to the strange country superstition that comes true, the writer displays the strange imagination that comes to deep human minds

Analyse : Roman d'amour. Roman du terroir.

"Joe and Kate Ruttledge, have come to rural Ireland from London in search of a different life. In passages of beauty and truth, the drama of a year in their lives and those of the memorable characters that move about them unfolds through action, the rituals of work, religious observances and play. By the novel's close we feel that we have been introduced, with deceptive simplicity, to a complete representation of existence - an enclosed world has been transformed into an Everywhere"--Cover.

"It is a village flirting with the more sophisticated trappings of modernity but steeped in the traditions of its unforgettable inhabitants and their lives."--Jacket.