3

The 100 best novels: No 97 – Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)

This modern Irish masterpiece is both a study of the faultlines of Irish patriarchy and an elegy for a lost world

Robert McCrum

Mon 27 Jul 2015 09.00 BST

John McGahern was a great Irish writer among a brilliant generation that included the playwright Brian Friel and the poets Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney. Equally gifted as a writer of short stories, his finest novels (a small oeuvre) include The Dark and That They May Face the Rising Sun. His influence lives on in the work of Colm Tóibín, who once described him as "the Irish novelist everyone should read".

The Guardian Profile: John McGahern

Read more