Memoir

Description

An exquisite new edition of this timeless and heartbreaking autobiography by John McGahern, described by Hilary Mantel as 'a glowing masterpiece'.John McGahern is one of the most influential Irish writers of the latter half of the twentieth century.Published a year before his death in 2006, Memoir is a moving account of McGahern's life and in particular his childhood in rural Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. McGahern's book, as Sean O'Hagan wrote in the Guardian, is 'a work of personal testimony that brims with remembered detail, and possesses an emotional intensity that, in places, is almost overwhelming'.The cover panels of this new edition feature artwork by Charles Shearer - an artist and printmaker who has made annual visits to Ireland for the past quarter-century.Memoir has been printed on premium wood-free paper using the traditional lithographic method on a small Heidelberg press. Each book is sewn and bound by hand, using a quarter-bound case of real cloth and printed panels front and back.

John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and brought up in the West of Ireland. He was a graduate of University College, Dublin. He worked as a Primary School teacher and held various academic posts at universities in Britain, Ireland and America.In the opinion of the Observer, John McGahern was 'Ireland's greatest living novelist'. He was the author of six highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories, and was the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship, the American-Irish Award, the Prix Etrangere 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 has appeared in anthologies and has been translated into many languages. His last book, Memoir, was published in 2005.