Writer John McGahern is one of the top writers of Irish literature. His works are appreciated by critics and are also popular with a wide readership. The novel Among the Wives is a family story set in the Irish countryside in the 1950s. Michael Moran is a prematurely widowed single father who raises his family – two sons and three daughters – with a firm hand. Each of his sons resists him in his own way, while the girls and his second wife Rose mostly submit to his stubbornness and capricious mood swings. They often feel like they are in a prison. But as the children gradually leave their home and start their own lives, except for Luke, they like to return to their home again and again, and their father's opinion is an important guide in their decisions.