'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins with one of the most arresting opening sentences in literature' Patrick McGuinness, from his Preface. A Portrait first appeared in instalments in the modernist magazine The Egoist in 1914, before it came out as a book in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland.

An autobiographical 'coming of age' story, A Portrait is Joyce's first novel.

Many elements of Joyce's own life - his Catholic schooling, his family circumstances and his father's financial difficulties, as well as his sexual, political and artistic awakenings - are fictionalized and in it he skilfully extend the English language, as it opens with a child's voice rendered by a third-person narrator, and closes with the mature Stephen's first-person reflections.