Julia O’Faolain Books

Julia O'Faolain's subtle, seductively plotted novel weaves together Ireland and Italy, romantic love and mystery... The invitation to visit the Cavalcantis at their family villa in Tuscany arrived quite unexpectedly. But in the wake of History finals, and still shaken by her mother's death, Anne decides to go. More then sun or a holiday, she needs to satisfy a lingering curiosity. For no lover of her own has yet been able to rival her mother's glowing descriptions of Cosimo - her ex-lover and a friend of the charming and formidable Cavalcantis.

Offers a rich, vivid portrait of the political and religious turmoil of sixth- century Gaul, wherein we find Radegunda, wife of King Clotair having been seized by him as a prize of war. Radegunda builds a convent, a refuge for the Brides of Christ, and there becomes renowned for her austerity and mysticism.

1878: Pope Pius IX dies, after a misguided papacy that has stamped out liberalism, centralized papal power and witnessed the Pope's declaration of Infallibility.

Julia O'Faolain is one of the most important Irish writers of the past half century. Her short stories are masterpieces of that demanding fictional form. Set in Italy, France, her native Ireland or the USA, they unpick the casual brutalities of a patriarchal society or the delusions of sexual desire. She is tough-minded and witty, and her depictions of Irish or Italian hypocrisies, and the male bastions of Church and politics, have the sharpness of a razor. These are stories that can shock the reader with their sudden, serenely-accepted violence. This book includes eight previously uncollected stories.

“A writer of stunning quality, a novelist of irony and compassion.”—Daily TelegraphParis in the 1890s. Adam Gould, whose Anglo-Irish father has disowned him, works in a lunatic asylum run by the celebrated Dr Blanche, some of whose patients once starred in France's social firmament and still, when sane, sit at table with distinguished guests.One such patient is Guy de Maupassant. Another is Belcastel, who has taken the blame for a monarchist plot against the Third Republic, then feigned insanity.Madness and uncertain identity drive Adam's story, fuelled by Maupassant's sparkling insights on the matter. Gould falls in love with a married connection of Belcastel's. And things are made no simpler on his return home, when he becomes entangled with a cousin who looks hauntingly like his dead mother …Julia O'Faolain was born in London in 1932. She has published many books to great acclaim, and her novel No Country for Young Men was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1980. This is her first novel in seventeen years. She lives in London.

Her story was this: she had been an orphan, her mother probably a whore. That's true of what brought her here too: was she IRA, or did she just take risks for the sake of a friend?Julia O'Faolain paints a portrait of young Irish girls and their unseverable connection, showing solidarity in places politics cannot reach.