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Five Recommendations from Anne Enright

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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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Interviews

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

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?

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, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gáis Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Her most recent novel, The Wren, The Wren, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature. She is also the recipient of the 2022 Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2024 Writers' Prize for Fiction, and the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.

‘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

Anne Enright

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

'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.

What Are You Like

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Anne Enright

Praise for 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

Hauntingly told

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

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

Hauntingly told

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

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

Hauntingly told

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

Books by Anne Enright

Series by Anne Enright

Irish Classics

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

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