Books by Anne Enright

The Wren, the Wren: A Novel

by Anne Enright

An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick • One of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year • One of the Washington Post's Best Books of the Year • One of Time's Best Books of 2023 • One of Harper’s Bazaar 45 Best New Books of 2023 • One of New Statesman's Best Books of 2023 • A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of 2023 • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year • Shortlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction.

An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists (The Times) about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.
Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at twenty-two Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s orderly home to find her own voice as a writer (mostly online, ghost-blogging for an influencer) and to live a poetical life. As she chases obsessive love, damage, and transcendence, in Dublin and beyond, her grandfather’s poetry seems to guide her home.
Nell’s mother, Carmel McDaragh, knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry too well―the kind of magic that makes women in their nighties slip outside for a kiss and then elope, as her mother Terry had done. In his poems to Carmel, Phil envisions his daughter as a bright-eyed wren ascending in escape from his hand. But it is Phil who departs, abandoning his wife and two young daughters. Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet” with the father whose desertion scars her life, along with that of her fiercely dutiful sister and their gentle, cancer-ridden mother. To distance herself from this betrayal, Carmel turns inward, raising Nell, her daughter, and one trusted love, alone.
The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of McDaragh women who must contend with inheritances―of poetic wonder and of abandonment by a man who is lauded in public and carelessly selfish at home. Their other, stronger inheritance is a sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.” In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.

The Wren, the Wren: A Novel

by Anne Enright

Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by TIME, The Millions, and Literary Hub

“A magnificent novel.” ―Sally Rooney

An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists (The Times) about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.
Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at twenty-two Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s orderly home to find her own voice as a writer (mostly online, ghost-blogging for an influencer) and to live a poetical life. As she chases obsessive love, damage, and transcendence, in Dublin and beyond, her grandfather’s poetry seems to guide her home.
Nell’s mother, Carmel McDaragh, knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry too well―the kind of magic that makes women in their nighties slip outside for a kiss and then elope, as her mother Terry had done. In his poems to Carmel, Phil envisions his daughter as a bright-eyed wren ascending in escape from his hand. But it is Phil who departs, abandoning his wife and two young daughters. Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet” with the father whose desertion scars her life, along with that of her fiercely dutiful sister and their gentle, cancer-ridden mother. To distance herself from this betrayal, Carmel turns inward, raising Nell, her daughter, and one trusted love, alone.
The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of McDaragh women who must contend with inheritances―of poetic wonder and of abandonment by a man who is lauded in public and carelessly selfish at home. Their other, stronger inheritance is a sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.” In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.

The Green Road: A Novel

by Anne Enright

One of the Guardian's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

"With language so vibrant it practically has a pulse, Enright makes an exquisitely drawn case for the possibility of growth, love and transformation at any age." ―People
From internationally acclaimed author Anne Enright comes a shattering novel set in a small town on Ireland's Atlantic coast. The Green Road is a tale of family and fracture, compassion and selfishness―a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we strive to fill them.
Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.
A profoundly moving work about a family's desperate attempt to recover the relationships they've lost and forge the ones they never had, The Green Road is Enright's most mature, accomplished, and unforgettable novel to date.

The Green Road: A Novel

by Anne Enright

Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize.
From internationally acclaimed author Anne Enright comes a shattering novel set in a small town on Ireland's Atlantic coast. The Green Road is a tale of family and fracture, compassion and selfishness―a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we strive to fill them.
Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.
A profoundly moving work about a family's desperate attempt to recover the relationships they've lost and forge the ones they never had, The Green Road is Enright's most mature, accomplished, and unforgettable novel to date.

The Forgotten Waltz: A Novel

by Anne Enright

Winner of the 2012 Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction

"A tour de force."―Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review
"A new, unapologetic kind of adultery novel. Narrated by the proverbial other woman―Gina Moynihan, a sharp, sexy, darkly funny thirtysomething IT worker―The Forgotten Waltz charts an extramarital affair from first encounter to arranged, settled, everyday domesticity…This novel’s beauty lies in Enright’s spare, poetic, off-kilter prose―at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It’s built of starling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another. Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who’ve ever lived." ―Elle

The Forgotten Waltz: A Novel

by Anne Enright

2012 Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Literature

A haunting story of desire: a recollection of the bewildering speed of attraction, the irreparable slip into longing. In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, it has snowed. Gina Moynihan, girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life," Seán Vallely. As the city outside comes to a halt, Gina remembers their affair: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina awaits the arrival of Seán's fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie-the complication, and gravity, of this second life.

In this extraordinary novel, Anne Enright speaks directly to the readers she won with The Gathering. Here again is the momentous drama of everyday life; the volatile connections between people; the wry, accurate take on families, marriage, and brittle middle age. With The Forgotten Waltz Enright turns her attention to love, following another unforgettable heroine on a journey of the heart. Writing at the height of her powers, this is Enright's tour de force, a novel of intelligence, passion, and distinction.

Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood

by Anne Enright

“One of the best books ever on the experience of being a mother.”―Boston Sunday Globe Anne Enright was married for eighteen years before she and her husband started having children. Already a confident, successful novelist, Enright continued to work after each of her two children was born; while each baby slept, those first two years of life, Enright wrote in dispatches about the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of motherhood. Supremely observant and endlessly quizzical, Enright “has pulled off that rarest of tricks: writing brilliantly about happiness” (Sunday Times).

Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood

by Anne Enright

A San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick

"Much of the book is astonishingly funny; the rest would break your heart." ―Colm Tóibín Anne Enright is one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation. The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, and her follow-up novel, The Forgotten Waltz, garnered universal praise for her luminous language and deep insight into relationships.

Now, in Making Babies, Enright offers a new kind of memoir: an unapologetic look at the very personal experience of becoming a mother. With a refreshing no-nonsense attitude, Enright opens up about the birth and first two years of her children’s lives. Enright was married for eighteen years before she and her husband Martin, a playwright, decided to have children. Already a confident, successful writer, Enright continued to work in her native Ireland after each of her two babies was born. While each baby slept, those first two years of life, Enright wrote, in dispatches, about the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of motherhood.

Here, unfiltered and irreverent, are Enright’s keen reactions to the pains of pregnancy, the joys of breast milk, and the all-too-common pressures to be the “perfect” parent. Supremely observant and endlessly quizzical, Enright is never saccharine, always witty, but also deeply loving.

Already a bestseller in the UK, Making Babies brings Enright’s autobiographical writing to American readers for the first time. Tender and candid, it captures beautifully just what it’s like for a working woman to become a mother. The result is a moving chronicle of parenthood from one of the most distinctive and gifted authors writing today.

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

by Anne Enright

An historical novel based on the story of Eliza Lynch, the Irish wife of a Paraguayan dictator, explores the relationship between this young European woman and the notorious Latin American leader Francisco Solano. Reader's Guide available.

The Wig My Father Wore

by Anne Enright

The second novel to be published in America by widely acclaimed Irish author Anne Enright, The Wig My Father Wore is a spry, hilarious novel about parents, love, religion, and the absurdities of them all. Grace is a young Dubliner who works on a television show called Love Quiz. Her father is going benignly senile, but her life otherwise seems fairly solid. When Stephen arrives on her doorstep, however, Grace has no idea what she's in for. Stephen explains that he is an angel, a former bridge builder who committed suicide in 1934. He has been sent back to earth (as all suicides are) to guide lost souls. Grace does not take this personally at first, but eventually she has to face the idea that things are not so easy, and that her greatest intimacy is with this supernatural creature. As Grace begins to take stock of her life and the prospect of caring enough about something to fight for it, The Wig My Father Wore takes us on a moving, surreal romp through Catholicism, parents, and the reclamation of love from the twin modern evils of cynicism and the detritus of pop culture.

The Gathering

by Anne Enright, Kelley Armstrong

An ordinary town . . . full of deadly secrets
Strange things have been happening in sixteen-year-old Maya's small Vancouver Island community—from the mountain lions that have been constantly approaching her to her best friend's hidden talent for "feeling" out people and situations. There's also a sexy new bad boy who makes Maya feel . . . different. Combine that with a few unexplained deaths and a mystery involving Maya's biological parents and it's easy to suspect that this town might have more than its share of skeletons in its closet.

The Gathering

by Anne Enright, Kelley Armstrong

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The Gathering

by Anne Enright, Kelley Armstrong

Anne Enright is a dazzling writer of international stature and one of Ireland’s most singular voices. Now she delivers The Gathering, a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family and a shot of fresh blood into the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, drowned in the sea. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him—something that happened in their grandmother’s house in the winter of 1968. As Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light. The Gathering is a daring, witty, and insightful family epic, clarified through Anne Enright’s unblinking eye. It is a novel about love and disappointment, about how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

Actress: A Novel

by Anne Enright

One of the Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of 2020
One of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020
A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction in 2020
Longlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction

A brilliant and moving novel about celebrity, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths.
Katherine O’Dell is an Irish theater legend. As her daughter, Norah, retraces her mother’s celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept secrets, both her mother’s and her own. Katherine began her career on Ireland’s bus-and-truck circuit before making it to London’s West End, Broadway, and finally Hollywood. Every moment of her life is a performance, with young Norah standing in the wings. But the mother-daughter romance cannot survive Katherine’s past or the world’s damage. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, Katherine’s grip on reality grows fitful. Fueled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime.
As Norah’s role gradually changes to Katherine’s protector, caregiver, and finally legacy-keeper, she revisits her mother’s life of fiercely kept secrets; and Norah reveals in turn the secrets of her own sexual and emotional coming-of-age story. Her narrative is shaped by three braided searches―for her father’s identity; for her mother’s motive in donning a Chanel suit one morning and shooting a TV producer in the foot; and her own search for a husband, family, and work she loves.
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.

The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story

by Anne Enright

Anne Enright has brought together a dazzling collection of Irish stories by authors born in the twentieth century – from Mary Lavin and Frank O'Connor to Claire Keegan and Kevin Barry. With a passionate introduction by Enright, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story traces this great tradition through decades of social change and shows the pleasure Irish writers continue to take in the short-story form.

Deft and often devastating, these short stories dodge the rolling mythologies of Irish life to produce truths that are delightful and real. Includes Roddy Doyle, Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin, Edna O’Brien, Colm Tóibín, Clarie Keegan and William Trevor.

A Very Irish Christmas: The Greatest Irish Holiday Stories of All Time (Very Christmas, 6)

by Claire Keegan, James Joyce, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, William Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen, Bernard MacLaverty, W.B. Yeats

The sixth volume in the popular Very Christmas series from New Vessel Press, this collection transports readers to the Emerald Isle with stories and poems sure to bring holiday cheer. This anthology is packed with beloved classics, forgotten treasures, and modern masterpieces. You’ll find wondrous works by James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Enright, William Trevor, Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, and many more. See how Christmas is done in snowy Dublin and on the mean streets of Belfast, from west coast to east, and even across sea and ocean to Irish communities in London and New York City. Put a flickering candle in the window and a steaming dinner on the table, and celebrate the Irish way—Nollaig Shona Daoibh—and Merry Christmas!

No Authority: Writings from the Laureateship (Volume 1) (Writings from the Laureate for Irish Fiction)

by Anne Enright

Anne Enright is one of the brightest lights in contemporary Irish literature. Her novels have received numerous major awards, including the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and she frequently appears in the pages of publications such as the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2015, Enright was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction by the president of Ireland. No Authority—the first book in University College Dublin Press’s series of the uncollected writings of the Laureates for Irish Fiction—turns the spotlight toward Enright’s short stories and nonfiction. The pieces in this book explore a range of topics—many touching on the idea of authority, and who truly possesses it—ranging from Enright’s relationship with Irish literature, how she coped with the loss of her father and the ascent of Trump in the same year, and the groundswell to lift the Irish constitutional ban on abortion in 2018. No Authority reveals the breadth of interest and expertise, as well as the urgent concern for the role of women in contemporary Irish society, that characterizes the work of this literary luminary in any genre.

Attention Writing on Life, Art, and the World

by Anne Enright

For thirty years Anne Enright--one of our greatest living novelists (Times)--has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and drawing us into her precise insights. These essays, collated from throughout Enright's career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen-eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: she interprets Sophocles's Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway; writes on Ireland's successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights; and offers new perspectives on writers such as Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner, and Angela Carter.

True to the themes that saturate her award-winning fiction, Attention explores the intersection between the personal and political, complex family dynamics, and the body in crystalline, urgent prose. This stunning collection unites Enright's cultural criticism, literary, and autobiographical writing for the first time.