Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Tóibín captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America's first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War. James left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.
In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of Tóibín's portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart and incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own fragility.
Tóibín is "a great and humanizing writer" who describes complex relationships in "supple, beautifully modulated prose" (The Washington Post Book World). In The Master, he has written his most ambitious and heartbreaking novel, an extraordinarily inventive encounter with a character at the cusp of the modern age, elusive to his own friends and even family, yet astonishingly vivid in these pages.
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
"Far more than a stunt, this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life." - Publishers Weekly
"The Master is hardly a typical summer book, but it is convincing and enthralling..." - The Washington Post
"Starred Review. Even the reader who knows little about Henry James or his work can enjoy this marvelously intelligent and engaging novel ... a beautifully nuanced psychological portrait." - Booklist
"A somewhat stately novel that will appeal most to readers who admire James's subtle, stylistically rich, demanding prose. As such, it's a formidably brilliant performance." - Kirkus
"Tóibín's enthralling novel displays-in a manner that is masterly-the wit and metaphorical flair, psychological subtlety and phrases of pouncing incisiveness with which a great novelist captured the nuances of consciousness and duplicities of society." - Sunday Times Review
"Whatever Toibin's literary-critical and ideological interest in James, The Master is unquestionably the work of a first-rate novelist -- one who has for the past decade been writing excellent novels about people cut off from their feelings or families or both." - The New York Times - Daniel Mendelsohn
"This is an audacious, profound, and wonderfully intelligent book." - The Guardian
"A sympathetic and triumphant novel of startling excellence….The Master is a portrait of Henry James that has the depth and finish of great sculpture." - The Observer
"Impressive and moving…the novel grapples with what it means to really live….The Master is a lovely portrait of the artist, rich in fictional truth." - Times Literary Supplement
The information about The Master shown above was first featured
in "BookBrowse Previews" - BookBrowse's monthly online-magazine that keeps our members abreast of notable and high-profile books publishing in the coming weeks.
In most cases, the reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication.
If you are the publisher or author of this book and feel
that the reviews shown do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available,
please send us a message with the mainstream media reviews that you would like to see added.
An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master's Son follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.
War, natural disaster, reckless gods and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that AS Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark.
A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, exploring how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths.
Brilliantly evoking the long-vanished world of masters and servants, Margaret Powell's classic memoir of her time in service is the remarkable true story of an indomitable woman who, though she served in the great houses of England, never stopped aiming high.
Vivid, daring, and unforgettable, The Printmaker's Daughter shines fresh light on art, loyalty, and the tender and indelible bond between a father and daughter.
I read The Healing in two sittings it is a fascinating story of plantation life at the beginning of the Civil War. Granada, a slave newborn child...
read more
The Uncommon Reader is a novella by novelist and playwright, Alan Bennett. The story starts with the Queen coming across the mobile library van...
read more
Amazon to open bricks and mortar store in Seattle(Feb 07 2012) Last week, the word in the blogosphere was that Amazon was considering opening a bricks-and-mortar store. Over the weekend goodereader.com added substance to...
Full Story
Arizona bills Amazon for $53 million in uncollected sales tax(Feb 06 2012) The ongoing sales tax battle between many US states and large online retailers, most notably Amazon, continues with a thrust from Arizona which, last week,...
Full Story
RSS feed
