The Making of a Writer
In 1979, in a remote corner of West Cork in Ireland, J G Farrell was drowned while fishing from the rocks near his home. He was 44, and it had been only six years since he had won the Booker Prize for his novel 'The Siege Of Krishnapur'. A man who elevated privacy to a high art, Farrell's legacy would be the 'Empire' trilogy, including the much-loved 'Troubles', now hailed as a classic of the 20th century; as well as a lingering air of mystery. Farrell had always been an inscrutable man.
This biography disentangles not only the full circumstances of the novelist's death, but the story of his life and how it informed everything he wrote. It charts Farrell's private world and his travels during the long hard years of his literary apprenticeship. Here is the moving personal story of a complicated man of great humour and brilliance.