The Green Road

A darkly glinting novel set mainly in a small town on Ireland's Atlantic coast, Anne Enright’s story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion is a novel about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them.

"Enright possesses an unusual combination of talents. She is a rich, lyrical prose writer, who cascades among novelties - again and again, she finds the unexpected adjective, the just noun."  -  James Wood, The New Yorker

The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. 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.

"... [Enright] showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare...When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered...This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink... A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature."  - Kirkus Reviews

Shortlisted for the 2016 Women's Prize For Fiction

Anne Enright has published three volumes of stories, one book of nonfiction, and five novels. In 2015, she was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her novel The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize, and The Forgotten Waltz won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.