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Extracts

Extract: The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

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

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Features

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

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

Anne Enright to receive the Irish PEN Award

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News

Anne Enright to receive the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature

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Podcasts

The Vintage Podcast: Anne Enright on why she writes and why we read

The Forgotten Waltz

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 Booker Prize-winning author

The Wren, The Wren

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN&rsquo;S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024 
WINNER OF THE WRITERS&rsquo; PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024 
 
Carmel had been alone all her life. The baby knew this. They looked at each other, and all of time was there. The baby knew how vast her mother's loneliness had been. 
 
&lsquo;A magnificent novel&rsquo; 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&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. 
 
&lsquo;A triumph&hellip;treasure it&rsquo; SUNDAY TIMES 
 
&lsquo;One of the great living writers on the subject of family&rsquo; NEW YORK TIMES 
 
&lsquo;A must-read&rsquo; MARGARET ATWOOD (on Twitter) 
 
&lsquo;Might just be Anne Enright&rsquo;s best yet&rsquo; LOUISE KENNEDY 
 
*A SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER, GUARDIAN, TLS, HARPER&rsquo;S BAZAAR, NEW STATESMAN, THE NEW YORKER, TIME AND WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR*

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&hellip; 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&rsquo;s The Wren, The Wren is so good they named it twice, so good I read it twice &ndash; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s lives

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

Masterful&hellip; The finest novel I have read in a long time

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

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

A triumph&hellip; This is Enright&rsquo;s best novel since The Gathering, and its absence from this year&rsquo;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&hellip; 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&hellip; The text is studded with Phil&rsquo;s poems &ndash; but the real poetry is to be found in Enright&rsquo;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&rsquo;s appalling behaviour, it is testament to Enright&rsquo;s subtlety as an author that she portrays his legacy &ndash; as a poet and a father &ndash; 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&hellip; A wonderfully astute and idiosyncratic commentator, with an eye for an oddity

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.

the Sunday Times bestselling memoir of stumbling into motherhood

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.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE

Actress

From the greatest living Irish author, a brilliant and moving novel about fame, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths

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.

Sentence after sentence is laid down with the solidity of a line of bricks, transforming ordinary life into something beautiful and strange… Every word feels right.

Anne Enright's Actress remains vivid in my mind many months after reading. No one is better on mothers and daughters. Actress is absorbing, entertaining and beguiling and stole the show for me in 2020.

When you hit the last page of Anne Enright's Actress you take a breath and dive straight back in again. Showcasing her mastery of the sentence and her extraordinary emotional intelligence...it's moving but never sentimental, funny but never pastiche.

Enright is quick, knowing, enjoyably sharp... There are leaps of joy in Actress... It sparkles with light, rapid, shrugging wit; cliches are skewered in seconds… The magic of pre-war touring players, holding audiences rapt in country halls, is richly done.

This book could easily, and mistakenly, be lumped together with other #MeToo novels; work that seems to feed the patriarchy rather than challenge it. Enright, sensibly, doesn’t care if she has your sympathy – she’s too cold, too sharp…so effective. No one understands rage, or the lucid, bleached moments that follow it, better than Enright… If these stories took a physical form, I imagine they would be a well-dressed woman screaming into a silk pillowcase. Which is to say, I love them.

Actress by Anne Enright is a brilliant, lyrical, powerful novel... It's dazzlingly sharp and unnervingly intimate.

Anne Enright's Actress is up there as one of my favourites this year.

Enright focuses on the complexities of human connection… gradually the subtleties form into something profound and complex…witty and really rather brilliant.

Actress is yet another typically luminous story from Irish author Anne Enright… a raw, tender portrayal of a woman undone by her work, and the men who control it. Seamlessly wrought, it is quite bewitching.

Anne Enright has an unmistakable diction and a genius for arresting detail. Her novel, a daughter’s account of her once-famous actress mother’s life, is a many-sided thing… Actress is especially good in its evocation of an Ireland and a Dublin that is vanished, highly developed in civility and language, voracious for gossip, sociable, religious, hypocritical, louche, drunken and with a sensitivity to the nuances of speech.

The narrative dances through plays, boozing and parties… Enright dwells, intriguingly, on passivity, a state common in acting, womanhood and living in Ireland… a winning read.

Actress is a remarkably positive story of female creativity, courage, survival and love… a tour de force of half-concealed effects and slow-burning revelations that splutter suddenly into flame.

Brilliantly and delightfully done… [Actress] is always interesting, and…very enjoyable.

[A] literary force to be reckoned with... [Anne Enright] is one of Ireland's most significant authors - and Actress will be a must-read for many in 2020.

A delicate, knotty reflection on familial relationships… brilliant.

Dazed Digital, *Books to Look Our For in 2020*

Another compelling effort filled with Enright’s trademark psychological insight.

Absorbing… Enright’s prose is so beautiful that even the shadows are graced with flickers of light… Actress is an elegant novel.

A warm and generous portrait of a relationship between a daughter and her famous mother… skilfully interwoven with Norah’s own story, and the twists and turns of her own life and marriage.

Gripping drama and a pitch-perfect evocation of the stages of Seventies Dublin and London’s West End.

Daily Mail, *Books to Look Our For in 2020*

A potent brew of fame, sexual power, hypocrisy and bad men.

Actress is a fabric of musings… The characters in Enright’s novels are absorbing because they seem recognisable in an unassuming way: they’re as lovely, boring and complex as the people outside the books.

Enright, herself a former actress, captures all the comedy and pathos that comes from living the strange, unreal life of an actor.

A raw, tender portrayal of a woman undone by her work, and the men who control it. Seamlessly wrought, it is quite bewitching.

Actress is a poignant tale of the vicissitudes of fame and its effects on the loved ones of the famous.

The next stage in an illustrious writing career… stuffed full of dark wit, memorable lines and striking images.

Enright is to Dublin as Didion is to California.

I've just started reading Anne Enright's Actress. I very much enjoyed her previous novel, The Green Road. This one has glorious lines even in the opening pages.

I would definitely recommend Actress by Anne Enright, it is her at her very best.

Few reviews said how absolutely hilarious [Actress] is. Enright skewers beautifully those creepy provincial aesthetes of Dublin of the sixties and seventies.

Enright is formidable in combining the concrete detail of lives – think of the extraordinary array of sibling portraits in her last novel, The Green Road – with an acute understanding of the inchoate lives of families: the push and pull of loyalty; the projection of desires; the smothering of disappointment and unhappiness. Here she conjures [a] rollicking story.

A rich, impressively imagined work about a stage and screen star who may never have existed but seems considerably more human than many real-life figures as seen through their own eyes or those of any but the finest biographers.

This story is about mothers and daughters, but also secrets in families and women in Ireland. It's an easy read, with a quintessentially Irish tone... It's brilliant.

Anne Enright's brilliant novel is a darkly glittering account of the cost to both the mother and her daughter of Katherine's complicated fame.

Anne Enright['s]...writing is simply glorious. Comedy and tragedy in one.

‘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 Green Road

A book about family, selfishness and compassion on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, from the Booker Prize-winner.

Confirms her as one of the most significant writers of her generation.... A master. She has certainly produced a masterly work.

The Green Road is true and rueful, as terribly adult in its clarity as its battered Madigans.

Enright is a shape-shifter who gets into the nerve centres of her creations; the power of her prose lies in its absence of ego. The Green Road is a devastating novel about home and how savage a place it can be.

This novel should confirm Enright’s status as one of our (their?) greatest living novelists. I hope she can be persuaded to do a sequel.

[A] brilliant, devastating, radical novel.

‘[Enright] is that rare thing: a very, very good writer… I settled into the book in a way I hadn’t done for weeks; the world of it seemed to me more transfixingly real than anything else, for the time I was reading it. When a writer of Enright’s quality pays such attention to the way that things really are, all we can do is pay rapt attention back.

Enright has written yet another wise and sophisticated novel... Simple and brilliant. You can’t even really call this ‘brave’ writing, because what makes Enright so good is the feeling that she was never afraid in the first place

An intense and thought-provoking read about family, behaviour and consequences… Will resonate long after the final page.

Enright is a writer with a wonderful and enviable lightness of touch… This is a wholly delightful novel, and a wise one.

Never self-important, never self-conscious, [Enright’s] huge, dazzling unnerving ability to observe, catch the telling detail, and dissect what we are like, has produced wonderful and wonderfully enjoyable writing… With each book Enright goes beyond her earlier achievements.

The novel’s form beautifully embodies its theme… Enright magics back a vanished time… [A] slow-burning, powerfully erupting novel.

What truly distinguishes The Green Road from so many other contemporary novels is the manner in which it is written. The pages slip by and nary a wrong note is struck. It is an enviable achievement and one which cannot help but bolster Anne Enright’s well-deserved reputation as one of Ireland’s finest novelists.

Like her Man Booker winning The Gathering, this new family saga is beautifully executed.

Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s most feted writers and The Green Road will only cement her position. Her extraordinary powers of description can crystallise a moment or a whole period of history in the tightest of prose and make this saga of family relationships…a must-read.

[Enright] is witty, sharp, profound, perceptive and often very funny.

A book of brawny prose sheathed in cool intelligence.

A memorable novel about family and legacy.

Enright won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for The Gathering and this triumphantly accomplished novel puts her in the running to do the double.

One calls this a novel but it could just as easily be a selection of short stories, each perfect of its kind… This is masterly prose… It’s a feat.

This is a rich, capacious story, buoyed by tender humour.

It’s Enright’s ability to capture with such wit and exactitude the multi-faceted, many-textured realities of her character’ lives that keeps the pages turning.

With The Forgotten Waltz in 2011…Anne Enright really found her voice. She returns to it in her new novel, The Green Road.

As the book snaps shut you almost want to applaud. That’s how good The Green Road…really is.

A beautifully observed study of motivation and memory, nuanced and funny and sad.

This is an insightful family portrait, by turns sensitive and stark, in which the challenges of modern life are tempered by moments of grace.

A piercingly beautiful collection of set pieces about the unresolved ebb and flow of family relationships.

Enright has delivered a fine work about how you can’t escape the past.

The novel of [Enright’s] already storied career.

With language so vibrant it practically has a pulse, Enright makes an exquisitely drawn case for the possibility of growth, love and transformation at any age.

No-one quite matches Enright for her quality of writing, her deftness of insight.

This is a captivating, spellbinding evocation of how your nearest and not-so-dearest can wreak emotional havoc.

The Green Road has been receiving glowing reviews and it's easy to see why. The story, set over four decades, gives us deep insights into the five main characters, all of whom tell us something about ourselves as Irish people, and all of whom you are sorry to leave as a reader.

Enright is the most extraordinary writer – her style is simple and honest, no gimmicks, just straight to the heart.

A powerful evocation of leaving and returning home.

Enright captures beautifully the tensions of…forced festive gatherings, the sibling rivalry and the maternal melancholy of a woman who does not understand her feelings towards her own children.

Richly and sensuously realised, it’s vivid with the particularity of places and people and bruisingly intelligent.

Enright shows real insight and perception when it comes to family relationships. It’s a well-structured and well-paced narrative.

Written with raw and brutal honesty, this is one to savour.

Enright’s writing is sharp and lucid and full of beautiful phrases and descriptions.

I love Enright’s style and the spidering out of the siblings’ lives.

There is beauty and darkness, hypocrisy and humility; it wouldn’t be an Irish novel without them.

The Green Road, about one Irish family, confronts all that is essential: love, death, mothers and our own flawed selves. It is written with a kind of tenderness, beauty and insight that transmogrifies humdrum experience into the epiphanic and back again.

Blisteringly funny and keenly perceptive.

Deeply affecting, crackling with wit, and consistently magnificent.

A globe-trotting, kaleidoscopic portrait of Irish siblings and their difficult mother.

A magnificent novel about family and belonging told in stark yet sparkling prose.

A fierce, funny, loosely woven family saga.

[A] darkly glinting novel of family life.

A bravura example of shifting voices and perspectives, all of which benefit from Enright’s splendid prose and careful restraint.

Enright dissects [her character’s] foibles with warmth, wit and a bracing lack of sentimentality.

A book you don’t put down until it is finished, dragging you right into the heart of another Irish family as only Anne Enright can.

A family saga, beginning with intense and beautifully detailed character studies.

I... enjoyed The Green Road for the dialogue, the clever narrative structure, and the gnarled, contemporary sense of family values.

I could not put it down. Chapter two is a masterpiece.

Stylish prose that charts the fortunes and misfortunes of this family over a period of 25 years.

In this brilliant, captivating novel, the poised, impossible and always disappointed matriarch Rosaleen Madigan makes life difficult for her children at a Christmas gathering.

Few Novelists pick apart domestic relationships with the poetry and precision of Anne Enright.

Sharp yet oh so subtle storytelling […] this is an author at the height of her formidable powers.

An exquisitely written portrait of a family, and a country, on the cusp of enormous change.

Exquisitely written and hugely enjoyable.

A brilliant approach to the sadness of a disconnected family, who are like satellites out of sync.

Enright’s virtuosic tale of an Irish family- the Madigans- across continents and decades withholds closure but doesn’t skimp on pleasure

A compelling novel, full of astute observations, beautifully written, sometimes stark and other times aching with longing

The sweep of the book and Anne Enright's way fo pulling this global migratuon story together with such energy and detail puts her in somewhere beside Toni Morrison

Heart-wrenching novel… The surgical precision of Enright’s writing makes you feel that she can, in Wordsworth’s words, “see into the life of things”.  There is a singing simplicity to it that tugs at your heart…A masterly work.

Beautifully observed.  Enright is a great writer.

An evocative story about family ties and belonging.

A story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion.

Sharply funny portrait of an Irish family meeting for a final Christmas.

Within pages I was wrapped in the warmth of Enright’s prose… This is a beautiful book… Enright is unquestionably a fantastic writer who, for me with this novel, conjured up the world of a family with all its highs and lows that felt like they might be having this reunion down the end of your road… Enright does two of my favourite things in fiction. She makes the ordinary, and everything we take for granted, seem extra ordinary. She also gives voices to those who have not been able to share their tales… The writing is stunning.

An evocative story about family ties and belonging. Anne Enright is deservedly a well-respected writer.

Anne Enright

The Gathering

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