The Master

The Master tells the story of Henry James, an American-born genius of the modern novel who becomes a connoisseur of exile, living among artists and aristocrats in Paris, Rome, Venice and London. Colm Toibin captures the exquisite anguish of a man whose artistic gifts made his career a triumph but whose private life was haunted by loneliness and longing.

Times Literary Supplement

Impressive and moving.the novel grapples with what it means to really live..The Master is a lovely portrait of the artist, rich in fictional truth.

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.