The Heather Blazing (Picador Thirty)

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 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.