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. Praise for A Guest at the Feast '... a Renaissance man who can do almost everything with equal brilliance ... His novels and stories imagine their way into the lives and minds of others with amazing empathy and skill. He's a deeply perceptive writer who can also be lethally funny and daringly erotic. He's a truly international figure, and a watchful historian of our times. He's a beautiful writer of loss and grief, silence and quietness. He writes with the intensity of a poet and the lyric rhythms of a musician. I have never missed a book by him and every book of his I've read has been a revelation. He's one of the essential writers of our times.' HERMIONE LEE 'Daring and precise' RODDY DOYLE 'Remarkable' MICHAEL WOOD