THE PORNOGRAPHER

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original brown cloth with gilt titles to the spine, in dustwrapper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth bright and fresh, with just a touch of rubbing at the spine tips and extremities. The contents, with some spotting to the top and fore-edges of the closed text block, are otherwise clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the lightly rubbed dustwrapper, which is without fading, loss or tears. Not price-clipped (£4.95 net to the lower front flap).

The author's fourth novel. Often regarded as the 'Irish Chekhov', acclaimed novelist John McGahern (1934-2006) overcame great personal and cultural obstacles to become a leading Irish literary force, seen by many as the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett. In his 2006 "Irish Times" tribute to McGahern, Colm Toibin remembers how, when a proof copy of "The Pornographer" arrived in the office of the Dublin magazine where he was working at the time, it was "read in a short time by a number of us who wrote for the magazine. We were in our early 20s and not special fans of the work of McGahern and yet we were stunned by the book. [I]n its sombre dramatisation of sex and death, it could equally have been written by a French existential novelist. Also, in the way the writer played with narrative, it could have been written by a modern anti-novelist. And yet it was rooted in a world which McGahern had already established in his three previous novels and two books of stories - the dull life of Ireland, full of rain and families and priests and early closing time."