Winner of the Premio Commisso in Italy for Best Biography 2004. 'McCourt has opened a whole new vista on Ulysses. No other critic or biographer has so clearly identified the cosmopolitan, indeed, the Oriental, aspects of Joyce's great symphony of cities. .... His book is a revelation.' - John Banville, The New York Review of Books Since the publication of Richard Ellmann's James Joyce in 1959, Joyce has received remarkably little biographical attention. The Years of Bloom, based on extensive scrutiny of previously unused sources and informed by the author's intimate knowledge of the culture and dialect of Trieste, is possibly the most important work of Joyce biography since Ellmann, re-creating this fertile period in Joyce's life with an extraoridinary richness of detail and depth of understanding.