The heather blazing

Colm Toibin is a master storyteller, renowned for his keen, spare style and the understated emotional charge of his novels.

Eamon Redmond, a High Court judge in his sixties, is now nearing retirement.

But where you would expect him to look back contentedly over a lifetime of achievement, Redmond is forced, unwillingly, into an examination of his past.

Land and sea, past and present, country and city, youth and age: Toibin employs the juxtapositions of life with effortless power, conjuring an authentic and deeply moving story out of the shadows of a man's memory.