Anne-Recommends-Article-Hero

Reading lists

Five Recommendations from Anne Enright

TWTW-Extract-PB-1

Extracts

Extract: The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

Anne Enright and Edna O'Brien paved the way. Image: Getty/Alicia Fernandes/Penguin

Main-Helen20Cullen-1800×1200.jpg

Features

How Ireland’s women writers found their long-overdue spotlight

Article20Card_Anne20Enright.jpg

Interviews

Shelf Life: Anne Enright on the five books that made her

What Are You Like

This book is so sad that you want to laugh out loud. It deals with areas of experience and patterns of living that no one else has noticed

Anne Enright is a very original writer - a spry surrealist who challenges the world with extraordinary, lancing sentences...so intelligent and so controlled

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and eight novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Other award include the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz, the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award and Novel of the Year (which she has won twice), the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature and the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction. Most recently she won the 2024 Writers' Prize for Fiction and the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.

'What is a really good novel like? This for a start' The Times 
 
When Maria turns twenty, she falls in love. She is in the wrong town, and he is the wrong sort of man. Going through his things, she finds a photo of herself when she was twelve years old. She has the same smile, but she is wearing the wrong clothes: she is the same, only different. 
 
Anne Enright's astonishing novel moves between Dublin, New York and London, following the lives of the real Maria and the girl in the picture. Stepping through the mirror to tell the story of the two women, both haunted by their missing selves, What Are You Like? is an exquisitely written disquisition on families and identity. Threading together the lives of two young women, it confirms Anne Enright as not only the most original Irish writer of her generation, but also as one of the finest, funniest, and most affecting.

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is as sensuous and polished as an ornate painting

Wonderfully written...a fascinating episode...which never loses its momentum or its sharpness of focus

Enright [has a] white-knuckle grip on language... A dazzling circus of words

Richness, texture, irony and razzle-dazzle are underpinned by a probing irony and a finely tuned historical sense... The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is a star turn: what on earth will she do next?

‘Wonderfully written...a fascinating episode...which never loses its momentum or its sharpness of focus’ The Times 
 
Beautiful Irishwoman Eliza Lynch became briefly, in the 1860s, the richest woman in the world. We first encounter her in Paris, in bed with Francisco Solano Lopez - heir to the untold wealth of Paraguay. The fruit of their congress will be extraordinary, and will send her across the Atlantic on a regal voyage to claim her glorious future in Asunción. 
 
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is a bold and brilliantly achieved novel about sex, beauty and corruption at the end of the old world.

The Portable Virgin

Witty and acerbic...unusual and elegant. She is a writer to watch

Introduces a new voice in Irish fiction...a quirky, subversive, original wit and an imaginative linguistic fluency which must be interpreted as the consolidation of a new literary maturity

In sentence after sentence as cool and clear-headed as the moment a migraine lifts, these pained, precise, disquieting stories restore to us the strangeness of the lives we follow beneath the surface of the lives we lead. The Portable Virgin is a remarkable debut

A great new Irish talent which we're bound to enjoy again. I can't wait

Discover Man Booker Prize winner Anne Enright's first collection of short stories. 
 
'Elegant, scrupulously poised, always intelligent and, not least, original' Angela Carter 
 
The characters in Anne Enright's fierce and witty first collection of stories stand at an oblique angle to society. Full of desire, but out of kilter, their response to a dislocated reality is mutinous, wild, unforgettable. 
 
'Quirky, subversive, original wit and an imaginative linguistic fluency' Irish Times

Includes Taking Pictures and Other Stories

Yesterday's Weather

One of the most accomplished Irish literary stylists of her generation. To read Anne Enright is to be enthralled and moved

Enthralling... Reckless intelligence, savage humour, slow revelation, no consolation: Anne Enright's fiction is jet dark - but how it glitters

'Shockingly beautiful and painfully funny' Observer 
 
A pregnant woman is stuck in a slow lift with a tactile American stranger. A naked mother changes a nappy in a hotel bedroom and waits for her husband to come back from the bar. A woman's one night stand is illuminated by dreams of a young boy on a cliff road, another’s thwarted by a swarm of somnolent bees. 
 
These are stories of women stirred, bothered, or fascinated by men they cannot understand, or understand too well. Their characters are haunted by the ghosts of the lives they might have led - lit by new flames, old flames, and flames that are guttering out. These are sharp, vivid tales of loss and yearning, of surrender to responsibilities or to unexpected delight. All share the unsettling, dislocated reality, the subversive wit and awkward tenderness that have marked Anne Enright as one of our most thrillingly gifted writers.

The Wig My Father Wore

Anne Enright is an eloquent writer - dazzlingly funny

Enright [has a] white-knuckle grip on language. A dazzling circus of words

Reckless intelligence, savage humour, slow revelation, no consolation: Anne Enright's fiction is jet dark - but how it glitters

Man Booker winner Anne Enright’s moving and darkly funny debut novel of sex, death and reproduction 
 
Grace is a TV producer whose life is transfigured when she answers the door to a fully-fledged angel. Stephen was a bridge-builder in Canada before he killed himself, but now that he has come to stay with Grace he spends the night hanging by the neck in her shower, to help himself think. She falls in love, moving steadily from the spiritual to the anatomical. 
 
Meanwhile, as her TV day job on the 'Love Quiz' begins to spiral out of control, on the other side of her life is her father, benign, bewigged and stricken by a stroke - apparently mad but probably the sanest person in her life. As the three worlds meet and merge in a forest of contradictions, we watch Grace take the pacific path from cynicism to innocence, as all around her the novel thunders to a conclusion. 
 
‘Reckless intelligence, savage humour, slow revelation, no consolation: Anne Enright's fiction is jet dark - but how it glitters’ New York Times Book Review

The Gathering

'Witty, original, inventive...utterly compelling' Daily Mail 
 
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 
 
 The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. 
 
 The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars. 
 
'It is clearly the product of a remarkable intelligence, combined with a gift for observation and deduction' A.L. Kennedy, Guardian

The Forgotten Waltz

A love story for our times... In a single sentence [Enright] conjures up that violent pendulum swing of emotion that can blow whole worlds apart... This is the great pleasure of reading Enright: her sheer virtuoso control of language, those compact sentences, with their occasional flares of lyrical beauty and emotional force

A powerful, moving book of secrets, longing and loss, from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering. 
 
 If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened. 
 
 She saw me kissing her father. 
 
 She saw her father kissing me. 
 
 The fact that a child got mixed up in it all made us feel that it mattered, that there was no going back. 
 
 **Shortlisted for The Orange Prize for Fiction** 
 
'Absolute genius' BBC Radio 4

The Green Road

The Green Road takes a familiar story, the troubled family reunion, and makes it feel fresh and new... wise, funny, moving.'

Old tensions simmer to a boil in this witty, poetic contender for 2015’s Costa Novel of The Year.

[It] is engaging, perceptive and often very funny.

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2016 
Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award 
Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize 
Winner of the Irish Novel of the Year 2015 
 
 
Hanna, Dan, Constance and Emmet return to the west coast of Ireland for a final family Christmas in the home their mother is about to sell. As the feast turns to near painful comedy, a last, desperate act from Rosaleen - a woman who doesn't quite know how to love her children - forces them to confront the weight of family ties and the road that brought them home. 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Actress

A perfect jewel of a book, a dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara, alongside her Man Booker Prize winner The Gathering (2007) and The Green Road (2015). Its brilliance is complex and multifaceted, but completely lucid… Actress is a deeply humane, often darkly funny novel about the exercise of power over sexually attractive women. The grim subject matter is illuminated by Enright’s acute sensitivity to language… Enright proves, once again, her genius.

Anne Enright, the unofficial rock star of literary fiction, cements her stardom with Actress.

Actress absolutely enthralled me… [An] immersive, masterful novel.

In Katherine O’Dell, her fictional fallen star of stage and screen…Enright has created a heroine as irresistible to the reader as to her audiences… She has become a byword for contemporary Irish literary fiction at its finest.

May I recommend Actress by Anne Enright. Her writing is always pitch perfect, but this is truly exquisite. If there is such a thing as the perfect novel, this is it.

Anne Enright's gorgeous book Actress raised an enviable bar: uniquely, in modern fiction, a novelist who can do justice to portraying a modern actor.

Written with all the ingenuity and twisty tautness of a thriller…[Actess], which vividly recreates the bohemian world of the theatre, is a study of love that is all the more uplifting because it is unsparing… I read Actress absolutely rapt from cover to cover.

The best novel involving theatre since Angela Carter’s Wise Children… This novel achieves what no real actor’s memoir could… Enright triumphs as a chameleon: memoirist, journalist, critic, daughter – her emotional intelligence knows no bounds.

‘Written with all the ingenuity and twisty tautness of a thriller’ The Times 
 
From the Booker-winning Irish author, a brilliant and moving novel about fame, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths. 
 
 This is the story of Irish theatre legend Katherine O’Dell, as told by her daughter Norah. It tells of early stardom in Hollywood, of highs and lows on the stages of Dublin and London’s West End. Katherine’s life is a grand performance, with young Norah watching from the wings. 
 
 But this romance between mother and daughter cannot survive Katherine’s past, or the world’s damage. As Norah uncovers her mother’s secrets, she acquires a few of her own. Then, fame turns to infamy when Katherine decides to commit a bizarre crime. 
 
 Actress is about a daughter’s search for the truth: the dark secret in the bright star, and what drove Katherine finally mad . . .

The Wren, The Wren

WINNER OF THE WRITERS’ PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024 
 
TAKE FLIGHT WITH THE IRRESISTIBLE NEW NOVEL FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNER 
 
‘A magnificent novel’ SALLY ROONEY 
 
Nell is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. Over them both falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. 
 
From our greatest chronicler of family life, The Wren, The Wren is a story of the love that can unite us, and the individual acts that threaten this vital bond. 
 
‘A triumph…treasure it’ Sunday Times 
 
‘One of the great living writers on the subject of family’ New York Times 
 
‘A must-read’ MARGARET ATWOOD (on Twitter) 
 
‘A pleasure from beginning to end’ Irish Times 
 
* Book of the Year for the Sunday Times, Observer, Guardian, TLS, Harper’s Bazaar, New Statesman, New Yorker, Time and Washington Post * 
 
Readers love The Wren, The Wren 
‘I was swept away… absolutely beautiful’ 
‘A must-read: her best novel yet’ 
‘Stunning… a five-star read’ 
‘A wonderful novel… I could not wish for more’ 
‘A novel to fall into… gorgeous’ 
‘Magnificent…moving, beautiful’ 
‘Spellbinding… you are astonished over and over’ 
‘I loved this book’

The Wren, The Wren is a magnificent novel. Anne Enright's stylistic brilliance seems to put the reader directly in touch with her characters and the rich territory of their lives

The Wren, The Wren may be her best book yet

Wonderful… This deceptively modest novel is the kind of book that will work on you long after you have put it down

These pages practically crackle with intelligence, compassion and wit. Phil McDaragh is so real I almost googled him. The Wren, The Wren might just be Anne Enright's best yet

Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren is so good they named it twice, so good I read it twice – and read two different novels, because moral positions are incorrigibly plural in Enrightville

Gritty, sad, sly, riotous... Gem-packed language that fizzes like a sidewalk firecracker. A must-read

Margaret Atwood, author of THE HANDMAID'S TALE (via Twitter)

The Wren, The Wren is Anne Enright at her lyrical, storytelling best

This is the golden age of Irish prose fiction. Of our many prodigiously talented novelist, few have the all-encompassing deftness of touch of Anne Enright

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

One of my books of any year. It’s about womanhood, youth and that slow, painful, but joyous estrangement that emerges between mother and daughter as life runs its tumultuous course

A work of astounding ventriloquism and hard-won hope about women’s lives

A brilliant and fierce novel… Featuring brilliant and fierce women characters, about the crossing (or uncrossing) of the most difficult border, that which exists within families

Masterful… The finest novel I have read in a long time

Shards of brilliance flash in every direction... Damn, Enright can write

Spellbinding… The Wren, the Wren is, like so much of Enright’s work, a supple scrutiny of familial relationships… We can feel how language, when it is sufficiently well arrayed, can cross the spaces between the page and the heart and, as Enright’s always does, hit home

A triumph… This is Enright’s best novel since The Gathering, and its absence from this year’s Booker longlist is nothing less than a miscarriage of literary justice. Readers must find it and treasure it regardless

To call Anne Enright's new novel a moving, nuanced glimpse at three generations of Irish life underplays its thrilling expansiveness: in the end, The Wren, The Wren is an electrifying romp through language itself - its dizzying possibilities and satisfactions - led by one the most gifted writers working in English today

One of our greatest living novelists

The unofficial rock star of literary fiction

Another exquisite read from the inimitable Booker prize-winning author

An astounding book. Anne Enright is the best living writer on the family and its difficult, disquieting intimacies, pulling back the sheets on sex and love, and meditating too on the complex inheritance of what it is to be an Irish writer

Vivid, voluble and deeply gratifying… A finely tuned account of an Irish family and the traumas handed down across generations

Somehow both classic and thoroughly contemporary. Very few writers could capably achieve such a thing and I remain, as ever, in awe of Anne's talents

Sara Baume, author of A Line Made by Walking

Enright expertly arranges echos and juxtapositions to achieve both psychological depth and formal beauty… The text is studded with Phil’s poems – but the real poetry is to be found in Enright’s prose, which is on sparkling form throughout

Tender, acutely observed, shocking at times. Enright perfectly captures the experience of a woman in her twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. Women rise throughout The Wren, The Wren, rising above abusive relationships and casual abandonment, sometimes inflicting violence on each other - but still rising into better times. Magnificent

Priscilla Morris, author of Black Butterflies

One of the most significant writers of her generation... A master

A book of musical tenderness and devastating precision, The Wren, The Wren makes its own weather - whilst reading, your heart will work to Enright's beat

Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Girl of Ink and Stars

This is Anne Enright at her best - a glorious multi-generational novel of mothers and daughters, of tangled relationships, secrets, bodies, sex. Sharp, sudden, mischievous, sublime - this is a dazzling novel. Nell must be one of the best young women I've read in recent Irish fiction

A slow-burning commentary on ancestry, love and longing, which leaves enough unsaid to truly captivate its reader

Alive and intricate, Enright's characters speak with a sharp-edged irony that opens into tenderness. As The Wren, The Wren unfolds, time does too. This is a humane and compulsive novel about the abandonments and reconciliations of love. Unsparing, witty, and full of hard-earned beauty

Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide

Anne Enright's style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion's; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro's; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O'Brien's

I could not put this book down, and felt at a loss when I got to the end. A novel of great heft and intelligence, with that mix of wit, rage and great tenderness that is Enright's hallmark. In Nell I found the best depiction of the life and mind of a contemporary young woman I've read

The Wren, The Wren is simultaneously all text, and all subtext, because Anne Enright is a genius whose novels function on several planes. She takes on major Irish literary genres but amplifies them, transcends them, arriving at a new place, which we shall call love, which we shall call life, which we shall even call joy

Claire Kilroy, author of The Devil I Know

For all Phil’s appalling behaviour, it is testament to Enright’s subtlety as an author that she portrays his legacy – as a poet and a father – in all its complexity, presenting a compelling and memorable portrait of a mother-daughter relationship that persists in the face of adversity

I absolutely loved The Wren, The Wren. What an utterly wonderful novel! It got into my very bones. It's magnificent. Proof once again that Anne can do things with sentences that nobody else can

Danielle McLaughlin, author of The Art of Falling

Stylistically magnificent and profoundly moving, Enright blows our hearts and minds to smithereens once again with The Wren, The Wren. Full of humour, intellect, empathy and grace this multi-generational novel is singular in its vim, freshness and wit

Helen Cullen, author of The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually

Enright is still at the business of obliquely charting the course of change in Irish life… A wonderfully astute and idiosyncratic commentator, with an eye for an oddity

A mature work with a wicked sense of humour

A thoughtful novel… with sublime writing and beautiful poetry

Good Housekeeping, *Summer Reads of 2024*

Nell is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell&rsquo;s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. Over them both falls the long shadow of Carmel&rsquo;s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. 
 
From our greatest chronicler of family life, The Wren, The Wren is a story of the love that can unite us, and the individual acts that threaten this vital bond.

Making Babies

1000 kilometres away from baby whisperer books, and one every petrified parent-to-be should read.

Fizzingly entertaining. Reading it is like having a conversation with your funniest friend. Enright has pulled off that rarest of tricks: writing brilliantly about happiness

Making Babies is an absolute joy, the perfect, intelligent antidote to poisonous books on the subject

An unadulterated delight...suffused with a sense of love and very, very funny

Gasp-making, jaw-dropping and eloquently astounding

Enright is such an original and witty writer. Her tone is utterly unsentimental and kept reducing me to tears

Anne Enright is an eloquent writer...dazzlingly funny

Making Babies is not just a good book, it's a good thing. It induces hope. It creates an appetite for life. It is also a very effective contraceptive

A hopelessly vivid maker of sentence, of the sort you can't help reading aloud to whoever happens to be nearby... Ms. Enright's commentary on gender politics and babies, like a swimming pool illuminated by underwater lights, also casts an entrancingly strange glow

Joyous!... very funny. With originality and truth, she perfectly nails the madness and simplicity of motherhood

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
 'An unadulterated delight...suffused with a sense of love and very, very funny' Maggie O'Farrell 
 
 It's 2004 and Anne Enright, one of Ireland's most remarkable writers, has just had two babies: a girl and a boy. 
 
 Making Babies, is the intimate, engaging, and very funny record of the journey from early pregnancy to age two. Written in dispatches, typed with a sleeping baby in the room, it has the rush of good news - full of the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of it all. 
 
 An antidote to the high-minded, polemical 'How-to' baby manuals, Making Babies also bears a visceral and dreamlike witness to the first years of parenthood. Anne Enright wrote the truth of it as it happened, because, for these months and years, it is impossible for a woman to lie.

Vintage Minis

Babies

Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book.

Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. Anne Enright describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her experience of having babies, from the exhaustion of early pregnancy to first smiles and becoming acquainted with the long reaches of the night. Everyone, from parents to the mildly curious, can delight in Enright’s funny, eloquent and unsentimental account of having babies. 
 
Selected from the book Making Babies by Anne Enright 
 
 VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
 Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Fatherhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard 
Motherhood by Helen Simpson 
Drinking by John Cheever 
Sisters by Louisa May Alcott

Anne Enright

With all its incisiveness, wit and brilliant sanity, Anne Enright's Attention provides a glorious antidote to the mad, sad world

The provocative, wise, compassionate turns her writing takes, always so alert, so attuned, so alive

Anne Enright’s essays are a joy to read: incisive, wise, often humorous, they are explorations of the way we live in the world today. I turned down so many page-corners as I read that I now cannot shut my copy of the book.

Anne Enright might just be Ireland’s greatest living writer… This autumn she’s publishing a collection of essays… I’m rereading her novels in anticipation

Anne Enright is a dazzling novelist…and an insightful essay writer… Attention confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels

In Attention you can experience the energy of her essayistic mind, whirring with ideas of justice, truth and imagination. It’s a remarkable place to be

What a pleasure this book is… I have admired Enright’s writing for a long time, but it struck me that she is one of the best essayists alive, as well as one of the best novelists, and ought to get more recognition for the former

My feeling reading this collection is that each precious line needs going over twice. First for the sound and shape of the words, the second for their meaning… [Enright] write[s] like a sharp, funny fallen angel and we will pay attention

Writing on Life, Art and the World

For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. 
 
Anne Enright has aways been alert to the places where public and private meet, where individual lives are caught by, or alter, the sweep of history. These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, and through voices, bodies and time. They delve into Enright’s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. Enright has spent a lifetime reading as well as writing, and she offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. 
 
Attention brings Anne Enright’s wide-ranging cultural criticism, literary and autobiographical writing together for the first time. In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.

Attention

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

sectionTitle

isEnabled

anchor

anchorLabel

prhuk/featured-book

prhuk/praise-section

maxBooks

showViewMore

prhuk/books-section

hideAuthorAlert

formName

iterableDivision

iterableBrand

buttonText

description

heading

legalText

successHeading

successText

image

alignment

variation

prhuk/email-section

prhuk/series-section

prhuk/biography-section

prhuk/articles-section

prhuk-authors

author-menu

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our&nbsp;<a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/about-us/notices/privacy-policy/">Privacy Policy</a>

Anne Enright

Praise for Attention

**With all its incisiveness, wit and brilliant sanity, Anne Enright's Attention provides a glorious antidote to the mad, sad world**

The provocative, wise, compassionate turns her writing takes, always so alert, so attuned, so alive

Anne Enright’s essays are a joy to read: incisive, wise, often humorous, they are explorations of the way we live in the world today. I turned down so many page-corners as I read that I now cannot shut my cop ...

**With all its incisiveness, wit and brilliant sanity, Anne Enright's Attention provides a glorious antidote to the mad, sad world**

The provocative, wise, compassionate turns her writing takes, always so alert, so attuned, so alive

Anne Enright’s essays are a joy to read: incisive, wise, often humorous, they are explorations of the way we live in the world today. I turned down so many page-corners as I read that I now cannot shut my cop ...

**With all its incisiveness, wit and brilliant sanity, Anne Enright's Attention provides a glorious antidote to the mad, sad world**

The provocative, wise, compassionate turns her writing takes, always so alert, so attuned, so alive

Anne Enright’s essays are a joy to read: incisive, wise, often humorous, they are explorations of the way we live in the world today. I turned down so many page-corners as I read that I now cannot shut my cop ...

Books by Anne Enright

Articles featuring Anne Enright

Five Recommendations from Anne Enright

Extract: The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

How Ireland’s women writers found their long-overdue spotlight

Shelf Life: Anne Enright on the five books that made her

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter