Böcker av James Harpur

A captivating journey into the heart of divine communion and spiritual evolution, through the lives of Christian mystics-from the early Church to the 1900s.

A new collection from James Harpur, chronicling his time at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1970s. Compelling, humorous and poignant, The Magic Theatre is an enthralling rite of passage amid the 'full catastrophe' of university life.

1900s London. For Patrick Bowley, fresh from rural Galway, a place of mind-expanding encounters with mystics, suffragettes, theosophists and free-thinkers. Drawn into the world of such luminaries as Jiddu Krishnamurti, Annie Besant and W B Yeats, it seems that Patrick is on a quest for meaning that will bear fruit. But a bruising failure in romance leaves him disillusioned with London and its class divisions and, in spiritual crisis, he flees to the familiarity of rural Ireland. But Patrick finds no peace and as Europe slides towards war and Ireland towards rebellion, his longing to shut out the world is challenged by a vocation to preach peace in Ireland that will not be quieted. And so he begins an epic pilgrimage to Dublin, arriving days before the 1916 Easter Rising. It is here that Patrick's journey reaches a gripping climax - one that finally reveals the true nature of the 'pathless country'. Winner of the J G Farrell Award and an Irish Writers' Centre Novel Fair Award, James Harpur's debut novel deftly weaves a story of spiritual awakening with fin de siecle alternative thought, love and political history, exploring how conscience and spiritual quest survive in an atmosphere of war, sectarianism and class hierarchy.

James Harpur entered a boy's boarding school in the 1970s and survived to tell the tale. Powerful, poignant and humorous, the poems in The Examined Life re-create a 'vale of soul-making' that, with its tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains, is like a microcosm of life itself.