A Radiant Life presents the unequivocal voice of Nuala O'Faolain tackling a vast range of subjects from Catholicism to feminism, from Sinatra to Africa, and from Irish American culture to Islam and the West. Curious and funny, tender and scathing, O'Faolain's columns were never less than trenchant and were always passionate. "I was blinded by the habit of translating everything into personal terms," she writes apologetically, but this is the power of her journalism. Through the prism of casual, everyday encounters, O'Faolain presses her subject, reaching beyond the prompting of the moment to transcend topicality. The result is a cumulative historical narrative, an inadvertent chronicle of a transformed Ireland by one of its sharpest observers and canniest critics.

An international bestselling memoirist (Are You Somebody? and Almost There) and novelist (My Dream of You and Best Love, Rosie), Nuala O'Faolain was for two decades a columnist for the Irish Times. She died in Dublin in 2008.