The Ambassadors

Introduction by Colm Toibin

One of the final masterpieces from one of the world’s greatest authors, Henry James’s The Ambassadors is now available for the first time in a Modern Library edition, with a new Introduction by acclaimed novelist Colm Toibin. A keenly observed tale of a man’s awakening to life, this dark comic novel follows Lewis Lambert Strether, a middle-aged widower, on a mission to Europe to convince his fiancee’s wayward son to forsake the pleasures of Paris and return to America. Rich with fin de siecle detail, The Ambassadors brims with finely drawn character portraits, including one of the Master’s most unforgettable heroines—the beguiling Madame de Vionnet. This was the novel that Henry James himself considered his finest, and no one is better equipped to put it into literary and historical context than Colm Toibin, whose award-winning novel The Master depicted the inner life of James in the final years of the nineteenth century.

Colm Toibin was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Brooklyn, winner of a Costa Book Award. Twice short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Colm Toibin is the Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Studies at Princeton University and lives in Dublin and New York.