Exiles by James Joyce
It's the summer of 1912. Back in Dublin after nine years abroad, Richard, a successful writer, and Bertha, his wife, have to confront two other people who love them, and ask themselves questions about guilt and responsibility. Will infidelity hold them together? Exiles is a startlingly modern picture of a marriage, based in part on Joyce's own relationship with Nora Barnacle, while the story of a renowned writer returning to Dublin after nine years of self-imposed exile reflects Joyce's experience, too. Exiles, his only play, was written between A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses - and famously rejected for the Abbey Theatre by W.B. Yeats. It is republished in this new edition - with a specially commissioned introduction by Conor McPherson - alongside a major revival at the National Theatre, the first in London since Harold Pinter directed it in 1970.