Most Popular Books by Anne Enright

One of Literary Hub''s Most Anticipated Books of 2026 From one of our most distinguished literary voices, a defining essay collection blending personal reflection with urgent political writing and wide–ranging cultural criticism. For thirty years Anne Enright―one of our greatest living novelists (Times)―has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and drawing us into her precise insights. These essays, collated from throughout Enright’s career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen–eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: she interprets Sophocles’s Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway; writes on Ireland’s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights; and offers new perspectives on writers such as Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner, and Angela Carter. True to the themes that saturate her award–winning fiction, Attention explores the intersection between the personal and political, complex family dynamics, and the body in crystalline, urgent prose. This stunning collection unites Enright’s cultural criticism, literary, and autobiographical writing for the first time.

Longlisted for the 2020 Women''s Prize for Fiction One of Time''s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 "A critique, a confession, a love letter—and another brilliant novel from Anne Enright." —Ron Charles, Washington Post Katherine O''Dell is an Irish theater legend. Every moment of her life is a performance, with her daughter, Norah, standing in the wings. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, however, Katherine''s grip on reality grows fitful. Fueled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime. As Norah''s role gradually changes to Katherine''s protector, caregiver, and finally legacy-keeper, she revisits her mother''s life of fiercely kept secrets; and Norah confronts in turn the secrets of her own sexual and emotional coming-of-age. With virtuosic storytelling, Actress weaves together two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, touching a raw and timely nerve.

A crowd of siblings gathers in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother in this "stunning" novel by the award-winning author of Actress ( The Washington Post). The surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering for the wake of their wayward, alcoholic brother, Liam, drowned in the sea after filling his pockets with stones. He is the third of the twelve Hegarty siblings to die. 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 prize-winning author Anne 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 an "wonderfully elegant and unsparing" epic of an Irish family ( Los Angeles Times)—a novel about love and disappointment, how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars. "Entrancing...a haunting look at a broken family stifled by generations of hurt and disappointment, struggling to make peace with the irreparable."— Entertainment Weekly "A melancholic love and rage bubbles just beneath the surface of this Dublin clan, and Enright explores it unflinchingly."— Publishers Weekly "Her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott''s; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O''Brien''s. The Gathering is her best book."—Colm Toibin "Hypnotic."— Booklist (starred review)

One of the Guardian''s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century "With language so vibrant it practically has a pulse, Enright makes an exquisitely drawn case for the possibility of growth, love and transformation at any age." —People From internationally acclaimed author Anne Enright comes a shattering novel set in a small town on Ireland''s Atlantic coast. The Green Road is a tale of family and fracture, compassion and selfishness—a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we strive to fill them. Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen''s four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. 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. A profoundly moving work about a family''s desperate attempt to recover the relationships they''ve lost and forge the ones they never had, The Green Road is Enright''s most mature, accomplished, and unforgettable novel to date.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by TIME, The Millions, and Literary Hub “A magnificent novel.” —Sally Rooney An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists (The Times) about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women. Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at twenty-two Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s orderly home to find her own voice as a writer (mostly online, ghost-blogging for an influencer) and to live a poetical life. As she chases obsessive love, damage, and transcendence, in Dublin and beyond, her grandfather’s poetry seems to guide her home. Nell’s mother, Carmel McDaragh, knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry too well—the kind of magic that makes women in their nighties slip outside for a kiss and then elope, as her mother Terry had done. In his poems to Carmel, Phil envisions his daughter as a bright-eyed wren ascending in escape from his hand. But it is Phil who departs, abandoning his wife and two young daughters. Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet” with the father whose desertion scars her life, along with that of her fiercely dutiful sister and their gentle, cancer-ridden mother. To distance herself from this betrayal, Carmel turns inward, raising Nell, her daughter, and one trusted love, alone. The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of McDaragh women who must contend with inheritances—of poetic wonder and of abandonment by a man who is lauded in public and carelessly selfish at home. Their other, stronger inheritance is a sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.” In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.

Man Booker winner Anne Enright’s moving and darkly funny debut novel of sex, death and reproduction Grace is a TV producer whose life is transfigured when she answers the door to a fully-fledged angel. Stephen was a bridge-builder in Canada before he killed himself, but now that he has come to stay with Grace he spends the night hanging by the neck in her shower, to help himself think. She falls in love, moving steadily from the spiritual to the anatomical. Meanwhile, as her TV day job on the ''Love Quiz'' begins to spiral out of control, on the other side of her life is her father, benign, bewigged and stricken by a stroke - apparently mad but probably the sanest person in her life. As the three worlds meet and merge in a forest of contradictions, we watch Grace take the pacific path from cynicism to innocence, as all around her the novel thunders to a conclusion. ‘Reckless intelligence, savage humour, slow revelation, no consolation: Anne Enright''s fiction is jet dark - but how it glitters’ New York Times Book Review

From a Man Booker Prize–winning author, a "hauntingly eloquent" novel of love, loss, family, and what a woman finds while in search of herself ( The Seattle Times). Born in Dublin in 1965, Maria Delahunty was raised by her grieving father after her mother died during childbirth. Two decades later, Maria is living in New York awash in longing and in love with the wrong man. Going through his things, she discovers a photograph of a little girl who looks an awful lot like her—but isn''t her. Soon Maria begins to unravel a long-buried secret more devastating than her father''s mourning, but bursting with possibility . . . "Glittering . . . An Irish woman with a plate of steel somewhere between her skin and her heart . . . must travel back and forth, from childhood memories to the present, ratcheting herself up to adulthood as so many of us do." —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review "So sad that you want to laugh out loud. [This novel] deals with areas of experience and patterns of living that no one else has noticed." —Colm Tóibín, New York Times–bestselling author of Brooklyn "The emotional tautness springing from bare-bones storytelling suggests Raymond Carver. The penetrative exploration of domestic relationships, especial among women, calls to mind . . . Anne Tyler." — Newsday

Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, and the Washington Post Book World. From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering and Actress, this is a collection of sharp, unpredictable short fiction about people struggling to connect in an increasingly disconnected world. Yesterday''s Weather shows us a rapidly changing Ireland, a land of family and tradition, but also, increasingly, of organic radicchio, cruise-ship vacations, and casual betrayals. An artisan farmer seethes at the patronage of a former Catholic-school classmate, now a successful restaurateur; a bride cheats on her rich husband with an old college friend—a madman who refuses his pills, disappears for weeks on end, and plays the piano like a dream. These and other stories make up a volume that is "astonishing: moving, emotionally accurate, sly, and laugh-out-loud funny" ( O, The Oprah Magazine). "A dazzling collection." — Time Out

Winner of the 2012 Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction "A tour de force."—Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review "A new, unapologetic kind of adultery novel. Narrated by the proverbial other woman—Gina Moynihan, a sharp, sexy, darkly funny thirtysomething IT worker—The Forgotten Waltz charts an extramarital affair from first encounter to arranged, settled, everyday domesticity…This novel’s beauty lies in Enright’s spare, poetic, off-kilter prose—at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It’s built of starling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another. Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who’ve ever lived." —Elle

A San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick "Much of the book is astonishingly funny; the rest would break your heart." —Colm Tóibín Anne Enright is one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation. The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, and her follow-up novel, The Forgotten Waltz, garnered universal praise for her luminous language and deep insight into relationships. Now, in Making Babies, Enright offers a new kind of memoir: an unapologetic look at the very personal experience of becoming a mother. With a refreshing no-nonsense attitude, Enright opens up about the birth and first two years of her children’s lives. Enright was married for eighteen years before she and her husband Martin, a playwright, decided to have children. Already a confident, successful writer, Enright continued to work in her native Ireland after each of her two babies was born. While each baby slept, those first two years of life, Enright wrote, in dispatches, about the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of motherhood. Here, unfiltered and irreverent, are Enright’s keen reactions to the pains of pregnancy, the joys of breast milk, and the all-too-common pressures to be the “perfect” parent. Supremely observant and endlessly quizzical, Enright is never saccharine, always witty, but also deeply loving. Already a bestseller in the UK, Making Babies brings Enright’s autobiographical writing to American readers for the first time. Tender and candid, it captures beautifully just what it’s like for a working woman to become a mother. The result is a moving chronicle of parenthood from one of the most distinctive and gifted authors writing today.

A novel based on the life of the nineteenth-century Irishwoman who became Paraguay''s Eva Peron, from the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Gathering and Actress. In the spring of 1854 in Paris, Francisco Solano López came to the house of Eliza Lynch to improve his French, or so he said. Eliza was nineteen, already with an ex-husband, and he was the young son of Paraguay''s dictator in Europe recruiting engineers for South America''s first railroad. By the time he returned to Asunción in 1855, Eliza was pregnant with his child. In less than a decade, López plunged Paraguay into a conflict that would kill over half its population. By then Eliza was notorious—as both the angel of the battlefield inspiring the troops, and the demon whose rapacious appetites drove López''s fatal ambition. This is her story, in which "Enright artfully explores the power of beauty and the beauty of power, and finds them remarkably similar as neither leads to a good end" ( Booklist) . "The magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez . . . springs to mind." — The Guardian "Water, an element as silvery and unpredictable as Enright''s extraordinary prose . . . transports Eliza from Ireland to Europe . . . to Paraguay and back to Britain." — The New York Times Book Review

The stories in Taking Pictures are snapshots of the body in trouble: in denial, in extremis, in love. Mapping the messy connections between people - and their failures to connect - the characters are captured in the grainy texture of real life: freshly palpable, sensuous and deeply flawed. From Dublin to Venice, from an American college dorm to a holiday caravan in France, these are stories about women stirred, bothered, or fascinated by men they cannot understand, or understand too well. Enright''s women are haunted by children, and by the ghosts of the lives they might have led - lit by new flames, old flames, and flames that are guttering out.A woman''s one night stand is illuminated by dreams of a young boy on a cliff road, another''s is thwarted by an swarm of somnolent bees. A pregnant woman is stuck in a slow lift with a tactile American stranger, a naked mother changes a nappy in a hotel bedroom, and waits for her husband to come back from the bar. These are sharp, vivid stories of loss and yearning, of surrender to responsibilities or to unexpected delight; all share the unsettling, dislocated reality, the subversive wit and awkward tenderness that have marked Anne Enright as one of our most thrillingly gifted writers.

Rosaleen ist eine Frau, die nichts tut und von den anderen alles erwartet. Sie ist Mitte siebzig, die vier Kinder sind schon lange aus dem Haus. Die Brüder Dan und Emmett sind vor der Enge der irischen Heimat in die Ferne geflohen; das Nesthäkchen Hanna wollte auf den Theaterbühnen der Welt reüssieren, spricht aber nun dem Alkohol zu, und Constance, die Älteste, hat sich selbst verloren. Doch abgenabelt hat sich keines der Kinder. Noch immer versucht jedes auf seine Weise, es dieser besten aller Mütter recht zu machen. Und scheitert. Da kommt die Einladung zu einem letzten Weihnachtsfest in Ardeevin. Rosaleen möchte das Haus, in dem die Kinder groß geworden sind, das voller Erinnerungen an glückliche Momente und Verletzungen steckt, verkaufen. Die Geschwister reisen mit diffuser Hoffnung auf Versöhnung an – und doch endet es, wie noch jedes Weihnachten geendet hat. Booker-Preisträgerin Anne Enright wagt sich auf den dunklen Grund unserer Gefühle, studiert menschliches Verhalten dort, wo es am störanfälligsten ist, wo Liebe und Hass nahe beieinander liegen und es kein oder zumindest kein einfaches Entrinnen gibt: in der Familie.