Julia O'Faolain, novelist and short story writer, is considered one of the most accomplished Irish writers of her generation and one of the few with a truly international background. While she is at her best in some darkly comic short stories concerned with the position of women, she cannot be categorized merely as a satirist. Her novels range from the burlesque adventures of a young girl in Paris to a brilliant evocation of sixth-century Gaul to the latest, the story of three generations of an Irish political family.

The daughter of writers Sean O'Faolain and Eileen Gould, she was born in London in 1932 and educated in Dublin by the Sacred Heart nuns. After taking a B.A. and an M.A. at University College, Dublin, she continued her education at the Universita di Roma and the Sorbonne, University of Paris. In Italy she met and married Lauro Martines...