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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

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

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

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

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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

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