"Every so often a book comes along that captures people, landscape and place in such a perfect rendering that you would recognize it instantly. . .By the Lake now moves onto this very short list."-The Seattle Times

"Deceptively wise. . . . Possesses the warm certainty of a writer who loves and respects every character . . . rascals and heroes alike, and who wants to deliver them to us in all their dimensions." -The Boston Globe

"The most perfect novel I've read in years." -Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

"Ireland's finest living fiction writer. . . .A gripping, poignant book." -Chicago Tribune

"This is the Irish temper, free of all the caricatures. . . . Writing this true, this unaffected-no wonder we celebrate the Irish." -The Dallas Morning News

"Wonderful. . . . No body of water has been so lovingly revered since Henry David Thoreau went to the woods.""-The Christian Science Monitor

"Has the appeal of a letter from home. . . . Wonderfully engaging." -Newsday

"His lyrical, almost painterly evocation of the activities he knows so intimately is well-displayed here."-The Washington Post

"Stumbling upon a novel like By the Lake is as rare a pleasure as finding an unspoiled country hideaway." -Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"McGahern enchants with simplicity and eloquence. . . . we are drawn into his corner of remote rural Ireland, its characters and their lives." -The Baltimore Sun

"McGahern's luminous threnody to the particulars and permutations of aging and change is captured in prose of the utmost simplicity and precision." -Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"This great and moving novel, which looks so quiet and provincial, opens out through its small frame to our most troubling and essential questions." -The Guardian

"This is a book to surrender yourself to. . . . you will find yourself in an intense, poetic world in which the simplest objects. . .take on a quiet but magical luminosity."-The Economist

"One of Ireland's most stupendous prose stylists, with an uncanny knack of homing in on the definitive moment, the illuminating detail." -The Independent

"This beautiful novel . . . bestows on the reader one of the principal gifts of fiction: that of having one's experience enlarged by a process of intense, almost resistless sympathy. Through intense concentration on the local, McGahern has again found a route to the universal." -The Times Literary Supplement

"A superb, earthly pastoral . . . a knowing, quick-witted performance . . . McGahern, a supreme chronicler [of] the closing chapters of traditional Irish rural life, has created a novel that lives and breathes." -The Irish Times

"When nature is rendered as vividly as this, it changes the character of fiction . . . McGahern has captured the ties of custom and affection that bind people to the land-and to each other." -Sunday Telegraph (London)