John McGahern, what have you done to me...! All I did was read "Amongst Women".

An innocent act of pleasure on the homeward stretch of a happy few days in Paris, but don't ask me what I remember of Northern France. I was n't there. The boggy quiet of Leitrim was where McGahern took me; through it's chattering birdscape, under the cool of it's trees, across the solitude of it's fields, and into stone-flagged kitchens. Places that throbbed with quiet desperation and shared glances, sometimes of joy, sometimes of resentment, sometimes anxiety, and the uncertainties of familial intimacy a brooding constant.

Perfect. I forgot everything, and let his prose, simple, understated, yet elegant, and no doubt all the harder to conceive because of it (there are no word fireworks with McGahern, only fine writing) take me by the hand into this unknown world.

"Amongst Women" is simply so deceptive; lives lived quietly, but ones lived powerfully and unforgettably. Moran, the father and pivotal character, is a flawed man, intense, protective, brooding, yet has a buried, sly wit and I have to say, more than a little, though peculiar, charm about him. Is n't that all of us though ? Complicated, complex individuals, often emotionally inarticulate, but who nevertheless know something within them is amiss. Easy to spot, then on the other hand so difficult to give fictional life to. McGahern has, and so well too.

I almost ran to the library this evening to hunt down more of his books.

I love making a discovery. The world of luminuous writing and clear, memorable prose, has no finite borders, thank God and amen for that.