Of all Irish writers living, John McGahern is now regarded as the most senior and the finest, and is the most respected. His range is not wide, but that is perhaps because his voice is so truthful: he writes about what he knows, what he has experienced and observed, and every word that issues from his hand shimmers with integrity. 

He has lived, for the most part, in Yeats’s words, ‘in one dear perpetual place’, in what seems, to the outsider, one of the least promising parts of Ireland: the small, even barren county of Leitrim in the north-west, where, it used to be said, ‘even the Protestants are poor’.