Showing results by author "Anne Enright" in All Categories

A book about family, selfishness and compassion on Ireland's Atlantic coast, from the Booker Prize-winner. 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 own children - forces them to confront the weight of family ties and the road that brought them home.

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.

A brilliant and moving novel about celebrity, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths. Bringing to life two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, both assaulted and silenced, both finding - or failing to find - their powers of recovery, Actress touches a raw and timely nerve. With virtuosic storytelling and in prose at turns lyrical and knife-sharp, Enright takes readers to the heart of the maddening yet tender love that binds a mother and daughter.

When Maria turns 20, 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 12 years old. She has the same smile, but she is wearing the wrong clothes. 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. 

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 book opens in Paris with Eliza 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 the regal voyage to claim her glorious future in Asunción. With the lavish imaginative richness of Márquez and the crazed panoramic sweep of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is a bold and brilliantly achieved novel about sex, beauty and corruption at the end of the old world.

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.

Es ist keine Liebe auf den ersten Blick zwischen Gina und dem Familienvater Seán, nur ein flüchtiger Blickwechsel auf einer Gartenparty...