"A Pagan Place is Edna O'Brien's true novel of Ireland. Here she returns to that uniquely wonderful, terrible, peculiar place she once called home and writes not only of a life there--of the child becoming a woman--but of the Irish experience out of which that life arises--perhaps more pointedly than in any of her other works. This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of druids in the woods, of unknown babies in the womb, of mischievous...

Herself surprised: Beginning her prison sentence, Sara Monday looks back on the foolish mistakes and changing fortunes that led to her incarceration. To be a pilgrim: Tom Wilcher, a rich Englishman who is treated as a foolish old man by his young relatives, looks back on his life and his unfulfilled spiritual yearnings even as he faces death. The horse's mouth: The third and most celebrated volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, is perhaps the finest...