The Gathering: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) - Tapa dura

"Stunning...The book's narrative tone echoes Joan Didion's furious, cool grief, but the richest comparison may be with James Joyce's "Dubliners"." -"The Washington Post" "Entrancing, unflinching, and insightful. "The Gathering" is a haunting look at a broken family stifled by generations of hurt and disappointment, struggling to make peace with the irreparable."--"Entertainment Weekly" "Enright has written a wonderfully elegant and unsparing novel that takes the old Irish subjects of family dysfunction and the vagaries of memory into territory made fresh by an objectivity so precise it seems almost loving. ...stunning control and flawless eye." -"Los Angeles Times" "An unflinching look at a grieving family...[a] very readable and satisfying novel." -Sir Howard Davies, Chair of Judges for the Man Booker Prize "[Enright] delivers with sharp wit and a huge heart." -"Elle" "Reckless intelligence, savage humor, slow revelation, no consolation: Ann Enright's fiction is jet dark--but how it glitters." -"The New York Times Book Review"

Anne Enright is a dazzling writer of international stature and one of Ireland's most singular voices. Now she delivers The Gathering, a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family and a shot of fresh blood into the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, drowned in the sea. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him --something that happened in their grandmother's house in the winter of 1968. As Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light. The Gathering is a daring, witty, and insightful family epic, clarified through Anne Enright's unblinking eye. It is a novel about love and disappointment, about how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars.