The Heather Blazing

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The Heather Blazing
First paperback edition cover
Author	Colm Tóibín.
Country	Eire
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Picador
Publication date	11 September 1992
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	224 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-330-32124-2 (first edition, hardback)

The Heather Blazing is the 1992 novel by Irish writer Colm Tóibín. It was the author's second novel and allowed him to become a full time fiction writer. The intensity of the prose and the emotional tension under the colder eye with which the events are seen, provided him with a faithful readership both at home and abroad. It won the 1993 Encore Award for a second novel.

[edit] Plot introduction

The novel tells the story of Eamon Redmond, a judge in the Irish High Court of the late twentieth century Ireland. It reconstructs his relationships with his wife and children thorough his life and the memories of a childhood marked by the death of his father. The County Wexford landscape and the death of the father are the narrative material, which Colm Tóibín would revisit again in the The Blackwater Lightship.

The novel also plots the development of Fianna Fáil from the austere republicanism of Eamon DeValera to the corruption of the Charlie Haughey era.

It has been said that this novel made Tóibín the heir of John McGahern.