Born in Dublin, James Joyce (1882-1941) spent most of his life abroad, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. His writings, however, mainly centre on Dublin - most famously Ulysses, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He pioneered and perfected avant-garde prose techniques that saw him rise to the rank of one of Europe's foremost Modernists.
Reading Finnegans Wake offers a pleasure that derives from its curious mixture of lyricism, humour, and the sense it offers of decoding a diabolic conundrum. -- John Lanchester * Literary Review *