The Master

Finalist for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Sunday Times Review

Tóibín's enthralling novel displays-in a manner that is masterly-the wit and metaphorical flair, psychological subtlety and phrases of pouncing incisiveness with which a great novelist captured the nuances of consciousness and duplicities of society.

He s written newspaper columns, travelogues, a history of the Irish Famine, and an examination of the Catholic Church in Europe, but Colm Tóibín is known primarily, in the words of one critic, as a novelist with a spare style and compressed but powerful prose that owes as much to the American writer Raymond Carver as it does to any modern Irish writer.