Julia O'Faolain, novelist, short-story writer, and translator, casts a writer's eye on concerns of the latter half of the twentieth century: the relationship between the sexes, nationalism, and the fading but still powerful hold of religion (particularly Catholicism) on modes of thinking and acting. Her fiction, dealing as it does with foreign places, people, and languages, depicts characters alienated from the friends, families, and faith that should sustain them.

Born in London on 6 June 1932, Julia O'Faolain is the daughter of Sean O'Faolain, the acclaimed Irish short-story writer and novelist, and Eileen Gould O'Faolain, an author of children's books and editor of several collections of Irish folktales and legends. Both parents were partisans of the original Irish Republican Army during the first third of the twentieth century; O'Faolain's father, in particular, was a critic of the Irish Roman Catholic Church, and his work was a frequent target of the...