Edna O'Brien

Longlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction A Times, Evening Standard and Financial Times Book of the Year I was a girl once, but not any more . . . A young woman, barely more than a girl herself, must learn to survive with a child of her own, in...

Edna O'Brien's first novel The Country Girls and its sequels The Lonely Girl and Girls in their Married Bliss changed the temperature of Irish literature in the 1960s. The characters of Kate Brady and her friend Baba Brennan have inspired generation after generation of readers and writers, as we see them struggling against the confines of a rural Irish convent...

I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter, to have read in the newspapers that as a writer I was past my sell-by date, yet regardless, to go on writing and reading, to be lucky enough to live in these two...

The Irish are renowned tellers of tales and these twelve enchanting stories of ancient magic, daring deeds, dashing heroes and mythical creatures sparkle with the wit, nonsense and naughtiness of Edna O'Brien's beautifully crafted storytelling. Tales for the Telling features traditional Irish folk and fairy tales, including 'The Magic Apples' 'The Swan Bride', 'Paddy the Piper' and 'Two Giants.' In...

When a wanted war criminal from the Balkans, masquerading as a faith healer, settles in a small west coast Irish village, the community are in thrall. One woman, Fidelma McBride, falls under his spell, and in this astonishing novel, Edna O'Brien charts the consequences of that fatal attraction. The Little Red Chairs is a story about love, the artifice of...

An unnamed protagonist is on holiday with her new, much-married lover, in the company of the monstrously rich. How long would she last? It would be uppermost in all their minds. Each day, while the others are out at sea, she is taught to swim. Eventually, she will be expected to perform. The pressure mounts; it is only a matter...

History is everywhere. It seeps into the soil, the sub-soil. Like rain, or hail, or snow, or blood. Josie O'Grady is an elderly woman, living alone in her dilapidated big house on the outskirts of a rural Irish village. Then one day her bedroom door swings open to reveal McGreevy, an IRA terrorist on a bloody crusade, who has chosen...

Such is the wrath of the mothers, such is the cry of the mothers, such is the lamentation of the mothers. Ageing Dilly Macready lies in her hospital bed in Dublin, awaiting a final visit from her estranged daughter, Eleanora, an author who fled rural Ireland years before, after her sensual first novel caused a local scandal. Through memories and...

A woman walks the streets of Manhattan and contemplates with exquisite longing the precarious affair she has embarked on, amidst the grandeur and cacophony of the cityscape; a young Irish girl and her mother are thrilled to be invited to visit the glamorous Coughlan's but find—for all the promise of their green gorgette, silver shoes and fancy dinner parties—they leave...

'Look Caithleen, will you give up the nonsense? We're eighteen and we're bored to death.' Baba lit a cigarette and puffed vigorously. She went on 'We want to live. Drink gin. Squeeze into the front of big cars and drive up outside big hotels. We want to go places.'Caithleen is a romantic: she dreams of finding a handsome man who...

The road silent, somnolent yet with a speech of its own, speaking back to them, father and child, through trappings of sun and fretted verdure, speaking of the old mutinies and a fresh crime mounting in the blood. The local community is shocked when a young teenager, Mary, attempts to get an illegal abortion, especially when they discover that she...

The spruces are so close together that the barks are a sable-brown. Michael O'Kane is known as the 'Kinderschrek', the 'child scarer'. He haunts Cloosh Wood in western Ireland. As a boy, he lost his mother, and by the age of ten, he was in prison. Now he seeks sacrificial victims to satisfy his delusional fantasies: a beautiful young mother,...

The taboo-breaking, the fabulous prose—there's no one like Edna O'Brien. Anne Enright Surprising and beautiful and courageous . . . A beacon. Megan Nolan We want to live. Drink gin. Squeeze into the front of big cars and drive up outside big hotels. We want to go places. Caithleen is a romantic: she dreams of finding a handsome man who...

Banned in several countries upon first publication, August is a Wicked Month is a simmering tale of a woman rediscovering herself on the French Riviera. Separated from her husband and with her young son away, Ellen leaves behind the loneliness of London for a new life of excitement and sexual freedom. But she soon discovers that independence isn't quite so...