The Green Road - Couverture souple

"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)

"Never self-important, never self-conscious, [Enright’s] huge, dazzling unnerving ability to observe, catch the telling detail, and dissect what we are like, has produced wonderful and wonderfully enjoyable writing... With each book Enright goes beyond her earlier achievements." (Niall MacMonagle Sunday Independent)

"The novel’s form beautifully embodies its theme... Enright magics back a vanished time... [A] slow-burning, powerfully erupting novel." (Michele Roberts Independent)

"What truly distinguishes The Green Road from so many other contemporary novels is the manner in which it is written. The pages slip by and nary a wrong note is struck. It is an enviable achievement and one which cannot help but bolster Anne Enright’s well-deserved reputation as one of Ireland’s finest novelists." (Alan Taylor Herald)

"Like her Man Booker winning The Gathering, this new family saga is beautifully executed." (Ruth Scurr Spectator)

"Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s most feted writers and The Green Road will only cement her position. Her extraordinary powers of description can crystallise a moment or a whole period of history in the tightest of prose and make this saga of family relationships...a must-read." (Mernie Gilmore, 5 stars Daily Express)

"[Enright] is witty, sharp, profound, perceptive and often very funny." (Sue Gaisford Financial Times)

"A book of brawny prose sheathed in cool intelligence." (The Economist)

"A memorable novel about family and legacy." (Good Housekeeping)

"Enright won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for The Gathering and this triumphantly accomplished novel puts her in the running to do the double." (Bookseller)

"One calls this a novel but it could just as easily be a selection of short stories, each perfect of its kind... This is masterly prose... It’s a feat." (Melanie McDonagh Evening Standard)

"This is a rich, capacious story, buoyed by tender humour." (Ron Charles Washington Post)

"It’s Enright’s ability to capture with such wit and exactitude the multi-faceted, many-textured realities of her character’ lives that keeps the pages turning." (Stephanie Cross Daily Mail)

"With The Forgotten Waltz in 2011...Anne Enright really found her voice. She returns to it in her new novel, The Green Road." (The Economist)

"As the book snaps shut you almost want to applaud. That’s how good The Green Road...really is." (Cath Turner Nudge)

"A beautifully observed study of motivation and memory, nuanced and funny and sad." (Eithne Farry, 5 stars Daily Express)

"This is an insightful family portrait, by turns sensitive and stark, in which the challenges of modern life are tempered by moments of grace." (Image)

"A piercingly beautiful collection of set pieces about the unresolved ebb and flow of family relationships." (Claire Allfree, 4 stars Metro)

"Enright has delivered a fine work about how you can’t escape the past." (John Dennehy National)

"[A] wonderful book." (Woman’s Way)

"The novel of [Enright’s] already storied career." (Irish Central)

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.