A Guest at the Feast uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet where life and
fiction overlap where one can be inside writing and also outside of it. From the melancholy
and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own
cancer diagnosis Tóibín 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. The imprint of
the written word on the private self as Tóibín himself remarks is extraordinarily powerful.
In this collection that power is gloriously alive illuminating history and literature
politics and power family and the self. 'Tóibín's voice is so powerful and distinct his
descriptions so precise that a single thread does weave through each of these pieces and does
not snap . . . perhaps Ireland's greatest living male writer' Sunday Times 'An unsurprisingly
erudite gracefully written unpicking of the world' Independent
