A young man driving across Ireland with his wife asks her how long she would wait before being with another man if he died. A man is trapped, hidden, in a small changing room by the sea on Galway Bay, as he listens to his friends discuss his wife's infidelity. An anguished young boy and his widowed mother struggle to reconstruct their lost father and husband in their own respective ways. The stories in Country of the Grand magnify a New Ireland as it copes with the rewards and pressures of its fresh success: immigration, mid-life crisis, adultery and divorce, a lost sense of place and history, and of course, what to do with all that prosperity.

Gerard Donovan is the author of the novels Schopenhauer's Telescope, which won the 2004 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, Doctor Salt and, most recently, Julius Winsome, described in the Irish Times as'a timeless fable of loss, isolation and violence.' Born in Ireland, he currently lives in a former railway station cottage in New York.