Watery Eyes / Grave / Prose

Here’s a tortuous, tortured cry of the heart, an Irish epithalamium for a lost brother. Easy to put down, hard to read. Brutal, bawdy, bathetic and all too heart-felt.

But by giving her narrator a family of 20 odd members, Enright creates such a tangle of narrative complexity that the reader gets lost in the maze – which one was Kit again, which one Ada? Probably they are all quite distinct in her mind, but they aren’t in mine.

Booker 2007 Long List
The Gathering by Anne Enright