Anne Enright – författare

"Anne Enright höjer sig över massan av moderna relationsromaner." DN

"Gärdsmygen är en magnifik roman" Sally Rooney

Nell McDaragh kände aldrig sin morfar, den berömda poeten Phil McDaragh. Men hans dikter tycks tala direkt till henne. Impulsiv, rastlös, och självsäker på ett sätt som man bara kan vara om man är tjugotvå, lämnar Nell sitt barndomshem för att leva en liv på egna premisser i Dublin. Här ska hon leva ett bohemiskt och hitta till sin egen röst som författare. Hon festar, trasslar in sig i destruktiva romanser och får snart jobb som spökskrivare till en känd influenser.

Nells mamma Carmen hamnar i existentiell kris när hennes dotter lämnar hemmet och hemsöks av sitt förlutna. Över hela familjen McDaragh vilar en skugga av Carmens far Phil - geniet, poeten, skojaren och förföraren. Mannen som var expert på vackra ord, men som på hemmaplan var en självupptagen mobbare av rang och som en gång lämnade sin cancersjuka fru med två små barn - Carmen och hennes syster.

Gärdsmygen handlar om tre generationer kvinnor i familjen McDaragh, tre kvinnor som alla försöker försonas eller göra upp med det avgrundsdjupa hål av förlust och ilska som den självupptagna Phil McDaragh grävt i deras familj. Det är sorgligt, humoristiskt och skarpt. Gärsmygen är en underbar roman om att ärva erfarenhet av förlust, trauma och överlevnadsinstinkt. Men det är också en berättlese om hur vi kan laga varandra, om alla de band som trots allt binder familjen McDaragh samman.

For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights.These essays, collated from across Anne 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' 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 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. Explorations of the intersection between the personal and political, the subtleties of bodily autonomy, complex family dynamics and the challenges of intimacy preoccupy Anne Enright's award-winning and critically acclaimed fiction. Here we see Enright grappling with and answering these questions in her non-fiction. It is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.

Katherine O'Dell is an Irish theater legend. Every moment of her life is a performance, with her daughter, Norah, standing in the wings. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, however, 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 confronts in turn the secrets of her own sexual and emotional coming-of-age. With virtuosic storytelling, Actress weaves together two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, touching a raw and timely nerve.

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.

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.

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 gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across 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' 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 including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner, and Angela Carter.

This stunning collection unites Enright’s cultural criticism, literary, and autobiographical writing for the first time. True to the themes that saturate her award-winning fiction, Attention explores the intersection between the personal and political, the subtleties of bodily autonomy, complex family dynamics, and the challenges of intimacy in crystalline, urgent prose. Here we see Enright grappling with and answering these questions in nonfiction. It is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.