That Fierce Virgin
She is an Irish doctor. One spring night, she takes him from a country dance back to her farmhouse, shared with her mother and aunt. He is an Australian marketing man, in Ireland to learn how to sell religious accessories. For her, he has served his purpose, sent on his way, she thinks for good.
But there is a mystery to be explored. It involves the confrontation of the rational and the mystical, as a naive new world meets a rich, religious culture, deeper than Christianity.
I'll Just Tell You This
Five generations of an Irish Australian family confess and gossip their
way through these pages. With tenderness and a precision that echoes the
surgical art of so many of his ancestral characters, the author lays bare
the stories and the sympathies that bind this family together.
This is a book about traditions, about handing on the sources of a family's
life - a notion emblematically suggested in a story about the transplanting
of a heart. Murderous nuns and happy deaths, shrouds and the last days
of Halley's Comet, widowhood and the composition of wills - this book
is seldom far from the facts of mortality, yet is pulses with life. Imaginative,
whimsical, moving, it's a true original.
The Harlots Enter First
Heaven Where The Bachelors Sit
Twenty-three young Australians became Jesuit novices in 1963; only two
are still members of that fabled Catholic order. Gerard Windsor was among
those who departed. Now one of our most stimulating writers, he tells
the story - of the bonding and coming of age of men in the idealistic
1960's through to the eventual disappearance of out Irish-Catholicism,
the strongest tribal identity in Australia's history. This is the landmark
book that defines a whole culture.
Elegant, compassionate, often very funny, this mosaic of autobiographical
stories charts the growht of an imagination and shines with the sparkle
of individual lives.
Memories of the Assassination Attempt and Other Stories
I Asked Cathleen to Dance
This is an intimate memoir - of Ireland and of women. From the seclusion and discipline of Jesuit life evoked in Heaven Where the Bachelors Sit, Gerard Windsor breaks out into a story of freewheeling, serendipitous encounters.
Cathleen ni Houlihan bewitches men. She is Ireland. The author first became infatuated with her as a young student in 1973, when he had not long left the Jesuits, in the early days of his belated experience of women.
I Asked Cathleen to Dance traces a heady affair in which Ireland and the women of Ireland are barely distinguishable. It's about the puzzle of coping with a country, and with women - neither of whom the writer can do without. He bikes to battlefields, undertakes pilgrimages, walks through the gloom to excentric mansions, takes public busses to a dead stop, and - almost incidentally - creates an enduring literary monument to hitchhiking.
This playfully wry, quixotic, always confiding story tells self-discovery, his entry into the bosom of Ireland and his winding journey into the world of women.
