The Frenchman's motives are complex, and far from altruistic—he seeks to dominate both the beautiful widow and the language itself for his own private purposes.

Irish novelist Audrey Magee’s second novel, The colony, was my reading group’s August book, and it proved an excellent choice. The novel moves smoothly from one point of view to the next, we see what the visitors and the islanders think, how their ideas and hopes contrast with the other. Literary and highly readable, with vivid characters and a sophisticated exploration of its subject matter, The colony engaged us on all levels.In flashbacks, it's revealed that he himself is post-colonial: his mother was Algerian, married to a French soldier, and that the islanders' Gaelic is an analogue for the Arabic he never learned to speak. The underlying theme is the collision between an ancient way of life on a small Irish island and two "incomers," who have their own less than altruistic reasons for visiting the island over one summer in the 1970s. there is droll humour, too, and the whole is animated by her characters' often entertaining back-and-forth. Such an INTERESTING novel about imperialism, colonisation, language and art, beautifully written and oh my God, the West of Ireland dialogue. He shows real talent as an artist, and believes Lloyd’s promise to take him back to England at the end of summer.

From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. I've always believed that good fiction can go to the beating heart of human reality in ways more likely to resonate with a reader than any textbook. In between chapters, like a radio bulletin, appear the murders that take place during this time in the north of Ireland. Inevitably, the two men lock horns, like “two bulls in a field”, each mocking the other’s mythologising of the islanders. The Colony’ by Audrey Magee is set on an Island just off Irelands Atlantic coast, where the population has dwindled to double figures.Maraid watches her son, James, striding out across the grass, a bottle of milk for each of their visitors in hand. Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange. The visitors are here to paint, to record, to celebrate - so they say - this island and its purity, the language all but vanished across the water.