The Master: A Novel

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

“Colm Tóibín’s beautiful, subtle illumination of Henry James’s inner life” ( The New York Times ) captures the loneliness and hope of the celebrated American writer in this profoundly moving historical novel about art, desire, and the elusive nature of intimacy.

Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America’s first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.

The emotional intensity of Tóibín's portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart and incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own fragility. With stunningly resonant prose, “The Master is unquestionably the work of a first-rate novelist: artful, moving, and very beautiful” ( The New York Times Book Review ).