An intimate study of three of Ireland’s greatest writers from one of its best-loved contemporary voices, Colm Tóibín.

In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Colm Tóibín takes three of Ireland’s greatest writers – Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce – and examines their earliest influences: their fathers. With his inimitable wit and sensitivity, Tóibín introduces us to Wilde Senior, the philandering doctor whose libel case prefigured that of his son; the elder Yeats, an impoverished artist who never finished a painting; and to John Stanislaus Joyce, the hard-drinking, storytelling father of James, who couldn’t feed his own family.

This is an illuminating study of how each of these men cast a long shadow not only over the lives of their famous sons, but over the works for which they are celebrated and cherished