A Deep Well of Want: Visualising the World of John McGahern

This book represents a unique visualisation of the world of Irish writer John McGahern through his words and the imagery of artist Paul Butler. Traumatic events in the lives of both McGahern and Butler shaped their paths, creating a want to write in McGahern and a want to create imagery in Butler. Butler explores the difficult and complex childhood that the two shared, and through a series of beautiful images that he himself has created in McGahern’s own part of Ireland, he draws parallels between them and, as Eamonn Wall says in his Preface, produces a rich and life-affirming appreciation of literature, art and imagery.