Irish Portraits: 14 Short Stories

The sea roars dismally round the shores of Inverara. A Stranger takes a room on the island. Here lives a couple whose married years have been joyless, until the presence of the Stranger unleashes their passions... For as spring softens the wild beauty of Inverara, the Stranger becomes conscious of the dark-haired Mary - how summer makes her shiver with life. He is the first man she has ever loved, and she thrills with sexual awakening. But with autumn comes danger. Peasants mutter superstition against Mary; Red John laughs at nothing, there's murder in his eyes; and a madman's yell hurls the Stranger back to sanity . . . . Intense, compelling, beautifully descriptive - as Wuthering Heights is to the Yorkshire moors, so The Black Soul is to the Aran Islands.

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.

O'Flaherty's 13th 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 tells of the struggles between the British landlords and the Irish tenantry.