Anne Enright

Anne Teresa Enright (born 11 October 1962) is an Irish author. She has published novels, short stories, essays, and one non-fiction book. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Before winning the Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favourably reviewed and widely praised. Her writing explores themes such as family relationships, love and sex, Ireland's difficult past and its modern culture, preoccupations, spirit of the times.

The Gathering - 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.

The Green Road - Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2016, the 2015 Costa Novel Award, Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and Winner of the Irish Novel of the Year 2015

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 children - forces them to confront the weight of family ties and the road that brought them home.


The Forgotten Waltz - Shortlisted for The Orange Prize for Fiction

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.

The story is, almost, an ordinary one. A 34-year-old married woman – sexy, energetic and independent-minded – falls in love with an attractive married man she meets at her sister's house. He has a daughter, who seems a bit odd. The affair goes through all the predictable stages: a drunken one-night seduction in a foreign hotel, a clandestine office romance, discovery and family recriminations, the romantic affair turning into a bickering second marriage, the ultimate loneliness of the woman.

But what deepens the mix are two discomforting, awkward and delicately handled factors. One is the sudden death of the sisters' dashing, stylish and gallant mother, who in the face of adversity would "get out the powder and blush" and spray on some Givenchy. Because of her consuming affair, Gina has not paid attention to her mother's illness, and the death catches her by surprise. Parental losses – as, over and over again, in Taking Pictures – are things that Enright understands, and in The Forgotten Waltz this grief is more touching than the grief of desire. The other fine thing is the difficult, insistent presence of Evie, the lover's daughter. First seen as an overweight, overwrought little girl, she grows up and makes more claims on our attention as the novel goes on. We learn her painful story, which changes our view of everyone else in the book, and Gina has to learn how to deal with her. That impossibly difficult yet involving relationship, between the father's mistress and the angry adolescent girl, gives us the last – and one of the best – scenes in the book.  The novel is told in retrospect from the end-point of the snow-bound winter of 2009, when Dublin has ground to a halt and the streets are empty and blanketed.  

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Three great Enright reads, with some wonderfully observed human interactions in each novel.  Notably for me, because the most memorable, is the New Year's Party in The Forgotten Waltz