"That They May Face the Rising Sun” by John McGahern is the September 2024 selection for the IrishCentral Book Club.
Each month, we will pick a new Irish book or a great book by an Irish author and celebrate the amazing ability of the Irish to tell a good story for the IrishCentral Book Club.
This novel, first published in 2002, was the sixth and final book published by award-winning Irish author John McGahern, who died in 2006.
The novel, published in the US as "By The Lake," won the Irish Book Awards in 2003 and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award.
In 2023, the novel was adapted into a feature film starring Barry Ward, Anna Bederke, and Ruth McCabe.
Synopsis of "That They May Face the Rising Sun” by John McGahern
Leaving their bustling London life behind, Joe and Kate Ruttledge have
settled in a small lakeside community in Ireland. They have a farm, subsidised by Joe’s writing, and their life follows a slow, gentle rhythm, in tune
with the seasons. The small dramas and quiet satisfactions of everyday life
fill their world: visits from their neighbour and dear friend the incorrigibly
inquisitive Jamesie, lambing and selling their calves at the cattle mart, and
visits to town to pick up supplies and local news.
John McGahern’s gentle, almost wistful, novel traces a year in the
Ruttledges’ lives, introducing perceptively drawn and wonderfully memorable characters while painting quietly restrained yet evocative word pictures
of a world in which each small change delicately re-distributes the balance
of the whole.
Looking for Irish book recommendations or to meet with others who share your love for Irish literature? Join IrishCentral’s Book Club on Facebook and enjoy our book-loving community.
Reviews for "That They May Face the Rising Sun” by John McGahern
"It is a simple and ordinary story, calmly, wryly crafted with subtle detail – and therein lies McGahern’s genius. As sharply, brilliantly observed as any he has written . . . McGahern, a supreme chronicler of the ordinary ... has created a novel that lives and breathes as convincingly as the characters who inhabit it." - Irish Times
"As a description of rural life, unfolding as majestically as the seasons, it is quite exquisite . . . When nature is rendered as vividly as this, it changes the whole character of fiction: you see the wider universe of which the human drama is part." - Sunday Telegraph
"That They May Face the Rising Sun . . . stands McGahern above any contemporary Irish novelist.’ The Times
"At last an Irish author has awakened from the nightmare of history and given us a sense of liberation which is not dependent on flight or emigration or escape." - Guardian
"Cloaked in the kind of wisdom that makes it translucent, not transparent ... You have to sense, to intuit, to feel your way through the narrative, hear the intent behind the wonderful spin of voices." - Guardian
About John McGahern
Born in 1934, John McGahern was the eldest of seven children, raised on a farm in the West of Ireland. The son of a Garda sergeant who had served as an IRA volunteer in the Irish War of Independence, he was devastated by his mother’s death when he was nine.
An outstanding student, McGahern studied at University College Dublin and became a teacher, but was dismissed when his controversial second novel, The "Dark," was banned by the Irish Censorship Board.
He moved to London to continue writing and met his future wife, Madeline Green, in 1967, with whom he remained until his death in 2006.
The author of six acclaimed novels and four story collections, his novel "Amongst Women" was shortlisted for the 1990 Booker Prize and made into a BBC TV series.
McGahern held numerous academic posts internationally and was awarded honours including the Irish-American Foundation Award, an Irish PEN Award, the Prix Ecureuil de Littérature Etrangère and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
On his death in 2006, McGahern was celebrated by The Guardian as "the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett."
Comments