A Guest at the Feast

<p><i>A Guest at the Feast</i> uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet where life and fiction overlap where one can be inside writing and also outside of it.<br><br>From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis T&#243;ib&#237;n delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson's fiction.<br><br>The imprint of the written word on the private self as T&#243;ib&#237;n himself remarks is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection that power is gloriously alive illuminating history and literature politics and power family and the self.<br><br>'T&#243;ib&#237;n's voice is <b>so powerful and distinct</b> his descriptions so precise that a single thread does weave through each of these pieces and does not snap . . . perhaps <b>Ireland's greatest living male writer</b>' <i>Sunday Times</i><br><br>'An <b>unsurprisingly erudite gracefully written unpicking of the world' </b><i>Independent</i></p>