Land

Born in 1896, Liam O'Flaherty is regarded as one of the most gifted writers Ireland has ever produced. His name is as much associated with recklessness and bravado as with literary achievement: he was handsome and daring, and by the time he was thirty his reputation was enviable. O'Flaherty's buccaneering spirit made him decide to join the Irish Guards: after being invalided out of the British Army in 1917 he travelled to various parts of the world taking all kinds of menial jobs, and it was not until he had been exiled from Ireland in 1922 for a wild escapade in 'The Troubles' that he began to write. He has the Irish gift for humour and vividness; for the basis of his stories he chooses simple situations which he evokes with insight and real charm.

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.