In these discerning essays on VS Naipaul, Alice Munro, William Trevor, Mavis Gallant and JM Coetzee, Sampson focuses "on a crucial moment in the formation of their artistic identities". He analyses a "pivotal" work by each in which they found their voice as writers. It was the moment when, in Naipaul's words, "it was as if voice and matter and form were part of one another". Although acknowledging that each writer is unique, Sampson detects similarities: migration and cultural dislocation, linguistic self-consciousness, remembering and reimagining their first home, and assimilating and rejecting writer/mentors as sources of inspiration. Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel was the turning point for Trevor because it marked a major change from satires of English social life to writing an experimental work with an Irish setting. "Trevor's imaginative engagement with Irish material in the late 1960s deeply affected the practice of his art of fiction for the remainder of his career."
