"McGahern brings us the tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth--the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own." --John Updike, from his citation when he awarded Amongst Women the GBA Book Prize.

Michael is a sensitive young man, earning his living by writing steamy stories about Mavis and the Colonel. He dutifully visits his dying aunt and, in the evenings, lives out the fantasies of his stories in a Dublin dance hall. During one of these nocturnal escapades the passive pornographer meets Josephine, a thirty-eight-year-old virgin who soon develops an appetite not only for sex, but also for love, marriage, and children. The story of their love affair is captured in this wonderfully observant, humorous, and compassionate novel by one of Ireland's finest writers.