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.

TAKE FLIGHT WITH THE BOOK OF THE SUMMER

‘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’

A contemporary novel of daughterhood and motherhood, from the Booker Prize-winning Irish author

‘A magnificent novel’
SALLY ROONEY, author of NORMAL PEOPLE

‘Might just be her best yet’
LOUISE KENNEDY, author of TRESPASSES

‘Gem-packed language… A must-read’
MARGARET ATWOOD, author of THE HANDMAID’S TALE (via Twitter)

Nell – funny, brave and so much loved – 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. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions.

This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A multigenerational novel that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.

‘One of our greatest living novelists’
THE TIMES

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 . . .

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.

See also: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle

Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award
Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize

**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN‘S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

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