The Master (2004)

Henry James's disappointment after a theatrical failure opens a quieter examination of how a writer arranges a working life. Tóibín connects professional choices to memory, visits and relationships that provide material but also make demands of their own. Creative privacy has costs for the people kept outside it. Choose this for an established novelist who still has to live with failure in another form, and whose attention to art does not settle the claims of ordinary intimacy.