Chapters (28)

He got out of the car and looked up at the house, from which came the sound of voices. Clamor gentium, the third stage of a good meal! What came before that? Yes, the tooth-work – stridor dentium. Well, they must be taking both stages together. And first of all, there would have been silentium; he had missed that stage. Hadn’t he had enough silences in his time?

He slammed the car door shut and hurried up the path. On his way, he turned to look for Mahon among the trees, but Mahon was gone. Only the gardener was there, the old man, head bowed, scything away. And Father Conroy plunged forward into the laughter and talk with an eagerness he had never known, not even when he drank the wine and broke the bread of life.

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About Richard Power

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About Richard Power

RICHARD POWER was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1928. An exchange scholarship took him to the United States in 1958 for two years of study and teaching at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He returned to Dublin and became a civil servant, but at the weekends and in the evenings he wrote: stories, essays, and plays, in Gaelic and in English. His masterpiece, The Hungry Grass, was first published in 1969. He died suddenly a year later, at the age of forty-one.

Endpapers

About the cover and endpapers

Anthony Klitz (1917–2000). By The River Lee, Cork. Oil on canvas.

Anthony Klitz specialised in painting impressionist style cityscapes, particularly in London. Later in his life he moved to Ireland where he continued to capture the hazy light of his surroundings.

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About Apollo

The Apollo list reflects in various ways the extremity of our time, and the ways in which novelists responded to the vertiginous changes that the world went through as the great empires declined, relations between men and women were transformed and formerly subject peoples found their voice.

Selected by the distinguished critic, poet and editor Michael Schmidt, in conjunction with Neil Belton, editorial director at Head of Zeus, Apollo makes great forgotten works of fiction available to a new generation of readers. Apollo will challenge the established canon and surprise and move readers with its choice of books.

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Copyright

Apollo Librarian | Michael Schmidt || Series Editor | Neil Belton

Text Design | Lindsay Nash || Artwork | Jessie Price

First published in 1969 by The Bodley Head Ltd