Northern Ireland may have shaped Brian Moore, as he grew up one of nine children in a Catholic doctor's Belfast household, but World War II took him to Africa and war-ravaged Europe, and Canada freed him to become a writer. It was in London in 1955 that he published Judith Hearne, the first of many novels which led steadily to international critical acclaim. The United States became his home, though he was no more likely to be pigeon-holed by a single country than to write the same novel under a different guise. He was a writer's writer, baffling contemporaries who wondered how he pulled off his literary feats while remaining accessible to everyone. Above all, he could wield a marvellous plot, create characters - male, and perhaps especially female - who would burst into life, and he could kindle atmospheres of haunting tension, historical vividness or metaphysical mystery.In this, the first authorised biography, Patricia Craig pieces together the colourful and peripatetic life that lay behind the novels. She also reveals the droll, romantic, cant-hating, affable and brilliant man who so disarmingly enhanced twentieth-century letters. Read Less