Although Frank Tuohy is relatively little known in the United States, he is critically recognized as one of the finest of England's fiction writers. Author of three novels and three collections of short stories, he became a biographer of some skill with his study of W.B. Yeats. As a master of style and a keen observer of social situations, he has been ranked with writers like Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch. He is particularly noted for his treatment of the expatriate, and his years of living outside England--in Finland, Poland, Brazil, Japan, and the United States--have given his fiction a unique stamp.

Frank Tuohy was born in Uckfield, Sussex, where his father, Patrick Gerald Tuohy, was a doctor. Irish, originally from Cork, and distantly related to James Joyce, his father was from a family who had, in the later part of the nineteenth century, become...