"The Gathering” by Anne Enright is the October 2024 selection for the IrishCentral Book Club.
Each month, we will pick a new Irish book or a great book by an Irish author and celebrate the amazing ability of the Irish to tell a good story for the IrishCentral Book Club.
"The Gathering," Irish author Anne Enright's fourth novel, won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2007.
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Synopsis of "The Gathering"
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968.
His sister, Veronica was there then, as she is now: keeping the dead man company, just for another little while.
"The Gathering" is a family epic, condensed and clarified through the remarkable lens of Anne Enright's unblinking eye. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations - starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman - showing how memories warp and family secrets fester.
This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.
Reviews for "The Gathering"
Winner of the Man Booker 2007 Prize and the Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award 2008.
"It is clearly the product of a remarkable intelligence, combined with a gift for observation and deduction" - A. L. Kennedy, Guardian
"She beautifully describes the way hurt can be inherited... Enright is a daring writer - witty, original and inventive... Utterly compelling" - Eithne Farry, Daily Mail
"A welcome return, for this writer, to novel form, and as a fresh, sophisticated take on the ever-popular dysfunctional family saga" - Eve Patten, Irish Times
"Anne Enright has all she needs in terms of imagination and technique and she's a tremendous phrase maker" - Adam Mars-Jones, Observer
"Enright ambushes as memory does, drawing you into an event and then questioning its reality" - Sunday Telegraph
About the Anne Enright
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three collections of stories, collected as "Yesterday’s Weather," one book of non-fiction, "Making Babies," and eight novels, including "The Gathering," which was the Irish Novel of the Year and won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, "The Forgotten Waltz," which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and "The Green Road," which won the Irish Novel of the year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Her work has been nominated for the Women’s Prize five times. From 2015 to 2018 she was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her latest, "The Wren, The Wren" is the winner of the 2024 Writer's Prize for Fiction.
(Synopsis, reviews, and biographical information courtesy RCW Literary Agency.)
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