'An astonishing miniature masterpiece, except there is nothing miniature about the forces at work in a story as violent underneath as it is demure on the surface... Maeve Brennan is not like anyone but herself. The ferocity of her vision of femininity is hers alone. The variations in The Visitor on revenges taken for love withheld or love perverted will stay with the reader forever. And the sadness of both needs - for love, and for revenge' Nuala O'Faolain The Visitor is the haunting tale of Anastasia King, who, at the age of twenty-two, returns to her grandmother's house in Dublin - the very house where she grew up - after six long years away. She has been in Paris, comforting her disgraced and dying mother, who ran away from a disastrous marriage to Anastasia's late father, her grandmother's only son. It is a story of Dublin and the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temperament. Recently found in a university archive, The Visitor was written in the mid-1940s but was never published. This miraculous literary discovery deepens the oeuvre of Maeve Brennan and confirms her status as one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce. 'To mention her in the company of Chekhov and Flaubert is only proper' Edward Albee