Liam O'Flaherty – författare

The Irish have always excelled at the short story, if we can judge by what survives of the old sagas. While all but one or two of the longer tales seem to the modern reader formless and quite unworthy of comparison with the Iliad and the Odyssey, many of the briefer prose narratives pack a whole gamut of emotions into two or three thousand words.

From vicious rival brothers to desperate single mothers, frisky newlyweds to frigid life partners, Patrick McGinley covers all kinds of Irish (or simply human) relationship in this collection of short stories. In fourteen stories, some brief glimpses of an hour in the life, some longer explorations of years of growing animosity, McGinley explores the ties that bind us: the bond of family, unbreakable even when we wish it severed; the financial and emotional connections we make with our neighbours and colleagues; even the brief and tenuous link between a con artist and his prey. In turns hilarious and heart-wrenching, sweet and savage, Irish Portraits gives the reader a first-hand look at the lives of its characters, a handful of countrymen with one thing in common: their humanity.

O'Flaherty's thirteenth novel is about the Irish land uprisings during the time of Parnell.Set in Co. Mayo during the early days of the 19th century Land War, this mighty epic of the Irish Land and People tell of the struggles between the British landlords and the Irish tenantry.

O'Flaherty (1896-1984), a young founder of the Irish Communist Party, was a member of the later generation of Irish renaissance writers. By his own admission he set out for Moscow on April 23, 1930, to collect material for a book on Bolshevism "to join the great horde of scoundrels, duffers and liars who have been flooding the book markets of the world for the last ten years with books about the Bolsheviks."