Edna O'Brien

In Edna O'Brien's twentieth work of fiction, an elderly widow on her deathbed in rural Ireland tells the story of her life-a story of love, family, estrangement, and motherhood.

Josie, a widow living in a remote Irish village, finds her solitude violated by an escaped IRA terrorist and in the end they reach an errie sympathy and understanding.

This richly peopled, compellingly readable novel explores the many lives of women-as mystic, mother, daughter, and lover. There is Iris with her "winsome wonsome" ways, no longer young; there is Charlotte, a troubled debutante who has fled from society; and there is the narrator, Anna, who feels that her emotional life has folded until she meets a young Spanish girl named Catalina. Set in a seaside enclave on the Mediterranean coast, The High Road...

The thirty-one stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without. Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are the prevalent motifs, along with the instinct toward escape and subsequent nostalgia for home. Some of the stories are linked and some carry O'Brien's distinct sense of the comical. In "A rose in the heart of New York," the single-mindedness...

O'Brien spins a tale of triple murder based on a notorious true crime. From an early age, unruly Michen O'Kane is the bane of village and countryside. The neglected and abused child's behavior worsens after he loses his adored mother, and, before he is out of grammar school, he is repeatedly incarcerated in juvenile detention institutions, where he is physically and psychologically damaged. He develops into a career criminal capable of violence, and...

Edna O'Brien's wonderful, wild and moving novel shocked the nation on its publication in 1960. Adapted for the stage by the author, The Country Girls, the play, is a highly theatrical and free-flowing telling of this classic coming of age story.

In A Pagan Place, Edna O'Brien returns to Ireland, the uniquely wonderful, terrible, and peculiar place she once called home. After leaving to join a religious community in Belgium, a young woman remembers her childhood on the western coast of Ireland. She reflects on the rituals of rural life, the people she encountered, and the enchanting beauty of the landscape. This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of mischievous girls and...

In these selections from twenty years of her best short fiction, Edna O'Brien's A Fanatic Heart pulls the reader into a woman's experience. Her stories portray a young Irish girl's view of obsessive love and its often wrenching pain, while tales of contemporary life show women who open themselves to sexuality, to disappointment, to madness. Throughout, there is always O'Brien's voice-wondrous, despairing, moving-examining passionate subjects that...