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Published May 2015
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
"Starred Review. This novel is a vibrant family portrait, both pitiless and compassionate, witty and stark, of simple people living quiet lives of anguish, sometimes redeemed by moments of grace." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Domestic fiction as a genre...can be brilliant in its understanding of the exact point where, in family situations, the unique meets the universal... Enright, Irish winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering and the first recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz (2011), is appreciated by critics and the general reading public alike as a writer comfortably fitting into [that] category for her exacting yet luminous expressions of family dynamics." - Booklist
"Starred Review. A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature." - Kirkus
"Booker Prize winner Enright (The Gathering) lays bare the hopes, desperations, and all too brief moments of understanding in family and modern life. Her unsparing look at the difficulties of being in the world will appeal to lovers of literary fiction." - Library Journal
"[Enright] is one of the most exciting, engaging writers that works anywhere in the world." - Paul Muldoon, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
"With Anne Enright, we are always in the country of the first-rate. Her work is stark, clear, authoritative, funny and inventive. We come away from her books consistently refreshed and renewed. She understands the full capacity of our stories and our language, braiding them together with apparent ease." - Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award and author of Let the Great World Spin
This information about The Green Road was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Hugo Chaloner
Anne Enright is author of seven novels, most recently Actress. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She lives in Dublin.
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