The Heather Blazing

infobox Book |
name = The Heather Blazing
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = First paperback edition cover
author = Colm Tóibín.
cover_artist =
country = Ireland
language = English
series =
genre = Novel
publisher = Picador
release_date = 11 September 1992
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages = 224 pp (first edition, hardback)
isbn = ISBN 0-330-32124-2 (first edition, hardback)
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The Heather Blazing" is the 1992 novel by Irish writer Colm Tóibín. It was the author's second novel and allowed him to become a full time fiction writer. The intensity of the prose and the emotional tension under the colder eye with which the events are seen, provided him with a faithful readership both at home and abroad. It won the 1993 Encore Award for a second novel.

Plot introduction

The novel tells the story of Eamon Redmond, a judge in the Irish High Court of the late twentieth century Ireland. It reconstructs his relationships with his wife and children thorough his life and the memories of a childhood marked by the death of his father. The County Wexford landscape and the death of the father are the narrative material, which Colm Tóibín would revisit again in the "The Blackwater Lightship".

The novel also plots the development of Fianna Fáil from the austere republicanism of Eamon DeValera to the corruption of the Charlie Haughey era.

It has been said that this novel made Tóibín the heir of John McGahern.