The Green Road - Tapa dura

"Confirms her as one of the most significant writers of her generation.... A master. She has certainly produced a masterly work." (Sunday Times)

"The Green Road is true and rueful, as terribly adult in its clarity as its battered Madigans." (James Wood New Yorker)

"Enright is a shape-shifter who gets into the nerve centres of her creations; the power of her prose lies in its absence of ego. The Green Road is a devastating novel about home and how savage a place it can be." (Frances Wilson New Statesman)

"This novel should confirm Enright’s status as one of our (their?) greatest living novelists. I hope she can be persuaded to do a sequel." (John Sutherland The Times)

"[A] brilliant, devastating, radical novel." (Kate Clanchy Guardian)

"‘[Enright] is that rare thing: a very, very good writer... I settled into the book in a way I hadn’t done for weeks; the world of it seemed to me more transfixingly real than anything else, for the time I was reading it. When a writer of Enright’s quality pays such attention to the way that things really are, all we can do is pay rapt attention back." (Emma Townshend Independent On Sunday)

"Enright has written yet another wise and sophisticated novel... Simple and brilliant. You can’t even really call this ‘brave’ writing, because what makes Enright so good is the feeling that she was never afraid in the first place" (Claire Lowdon Literary Review)

"Superb." (Terry Eagleton London Review of Books)

"An intense and thought-provoking read about family, behaviour and consequences... Will resonate long after the final page." (Jacqueline Kilikita Stylist)

"Enright is a writer with a wonderful and enviable lightness of touch... This is a wholly delightful novel, and a wise one." (Allan Massie Scotsman)

Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award
Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize

A darkly glinting novel set on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, The Green Road is a story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion – a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them.

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.

Anne Enright is addicted to the truth of things. Sentence by sentence, there are few writers alive who can invest the language with such torque and gleam, such wit and longing – who can write dialogue that speaks itself aloud, who can show us the million splinters of her characters’ lives then pull them back up together again, into a perfect glass.