1 1

Troubles

Troubles

by J.G. Farrell, introduction by John Banville

$18.95
$0.00 $18.95
Available as E-Book British & Irish Literature Historical Fiction Literature in English
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble

Winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize, awarded in 2010, to a book published in 1970

1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family’s fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel’s hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of “the troubles.”

Troubles is a hilarious and heartbreaking work by a modern master of the historical novel. J.G. Farrell, introduction by John Banville

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590170182
Pages: 480
Publication Date:

Praise

We find in Farrell’s novels links between the depicted colonial past and the postcolonial present that yield an abundance of ironies and ambiguous parallels.
—Ivan Kreilkamp,​ Public Books

Remarkable .... Mr. Farrell deserves high praise for this novel. It is subtly modulated, richly textured, sad, funny, and altogether memorable.
— Times Literary Supplement

A tour de force .... sad, tragic, also very funny.
— The Guardian

Farrell wrote superbly; all his books had a quality that hallmarks great literary talent—he could "do" texture. This album—which is what Troubles feels like—records the same Anglo-Irish as Elizabeth Bowen knew and belonged to. As with Bowen, this feels like the real thing (which is all a novel has to do). Always judge a writer by his grasp of what he doesn't know: Farrell died young yet his old people are almost his best creations.
— Frank Delaney, The Guardian

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it