The Barracks - by John McGahern

Born in Dublin in 1934, John McGahern was, in the opinion of London's Observer, "Ireland's greatest living novelist" before his death in 2006. He was the author of four story collections and six novels, including Amongst Women, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the Irish Times Award, and was made into a BBC television series. The Barracks, from 1963, is McGahern's first novel, about a woman who becomes the second wife of a policeman. The children she raises are not her own, her husband is straining against his job, and her own life, threatened by cancer, seems to be losing the last vestiges of its purpose.

Paperback / 232 pages / Irish fiction