The Woodcutter and His Family Frank McGuinness - Brandon/O'Brien Press

A new literary masterpiece

Zurich. January 1941. The World War intensifies in Europe. In Zurich a writer breathes his last imagining his life till now from his childhood in Dublin. The voices of his family circling him – wife, son, daughter – carry him to his end as he hears each separate chapter chronicling the power of their passion for their famous father, their love, their hate, their need, their sorrows and joys, their strangeness. And James Joyce has saved for them one last story to delight and defy them: The Woodcutter And His Children …

“It has the texture of a masterwork — uncompromising, adroit, properly
audacious, the offspring of a radiant curiosity.” Sebastian Barry

 

Frank McGuinness is Professor of Creative Writing in University College Dublin. A world-renowned playwright, his first great stage hit was the highly acclaimed and award-winning Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. His other plays include The Hanging Gardens (his dramatization of James Joyce’s The Dead), Dolly’s West Kitchen, The Factory Girls, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, and The Match Box. McGuinness is a skilled adapter of plays by writers such as Ibsen, Sophocles, Chekhov and Brecht, and has written several film scripts, including that for ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’, and a number of poetry anthologies. His first novel, Arimathea, was published by The O’Brien Press in 2013, to great acclaim. In 2014, Frank McGuinness was awarded the Irish Pen Award.