2004 Man Booker Prize Shortlist

Information and Book Review

The Master
General Information
	The Master by Colm Tóibín Published by Picador UK Publication Date: 4/16/04
About the Author
	Colm Tóibín was born in Wexford, Ireland in May, 1955. He is the author of four other novels, The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His non-fiction includes Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona, The Sign of the Cross and Love in a Dark Time. Colm Tóibín's debut play, Beauty in a Broken Place, has recently premiered in Dublin. Colm Tóibín lives in Dublin.
Publisher's Comments	In The Master, Colm Tóibín tells the story of Henry James, an American-born genius of the modern novel who became a connoisseur of exile, living among artists and aristocrats in Paris, Rome, Venice and London. In January 1895 James anticipates the opening of his first play in London. He has never been so vulnerable, nor felt so deeply unsuited to the public gaze. When the production fails, he returns, chastened, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost. Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man whose artistic gifts made his career a triumph but whose private life was haunted by loneliness and longing, and whose sexual identity remained unresolved. Henry James circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, he was lauded and admired, yet his attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.
TurboBookSnob Review	Coming Soon!
Selected Quotes	"The following morning, when he had finished his breakfast, he sat in the garden for some moments waiting for the arrival of MacAlpine. Already the sky was cloudless; he carried his chair to the corner of the garden which caught the sun at this time. Andersen was still asleep, as far as he knew, but had said, in any case, that he wished to breakfast in his room. When the Scot arrived, they moved into the garden room and set to work immediately. He had looked at the typed pages from yesterday before he went to bed and made his corrections to them; now, within an hour, he would complete a story, and, as the sun moved hauntingly across the garden, and the day became warm, he started on another story, the scale even smaller than the one before, the effect almost defiantly miniscule and unportentous. He dictated with his usual mixture of certainty and hesitation, stopping briefly and darting forward again, and then going to the window, as if to find the word or phrase he sought in the garden, among the shrubs or the creepers or the abundant growth of late summer, and turning back deliberately into the cool room with the right phrase in his head and the sentence which followed until the paragraph had been completed. Read more
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