Finnegans Wake

James Joyce's final, dazzlingly experimental masterpiece, with a new introduction by Brian Fox

'A great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page' - Anthony Burgess

James Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, conjures up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dream with supreme linguistic virtuosity. Here Joyce undermines traditional storytelling and the English language, and confronts the different kinds of betrayal – cultural, political and sexual – that he saw at the heart of Irish history. Dazzlingly inventive, with passages of great lyrical beauty and humour, Finnegans Wake remains one of the most remarkable works of the twentieth century.

‘Here words are not the polite contortions of twentieth-century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear’ Samuel Beckett

With a new introduction by Brian Fox.

About the Author

James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin in 1882. At twenty years old, Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. His writings include Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, Pomes Penyeach, and Finnegans Wake. Ulysses required seven years to complete and Finnegans Wake took seventeen. Both works revolutionized the form, structure, and content of the novel. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.