Edna O'Brien

"Ten years on from her last novel, Edna O'Brien reminds us why she is thought to be one of the great Irish writers of this and any generation. When a wanted war criminal from the Balkans, masquerading as a faith healer, settles in a small west coast Irish village, the community are in thrall. One woman, Fidelma McBride, falls under his spell and in this astonishing novel, Edna O'Brien charts the consequences of that fatal attraction. The Little Red...

Edna O'Brien, the author of "The Country Girls" trilogy, "The Light of Evening," and "Byron in Love," portrays the events, people, emotions, and landscape that contributed to her rich and heady life. She is the recipient of the James Joyce Ulysses Medal, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Wild Decembers charts the quick and critical demise of relations between Joseph Brennan and Mick Bugler-"the warring sons of warring sons"-in the countryside of Western Ireland. With her inimitable gift for describing the occasions of heartbreak, O'Brien brings Joseph's live for his land to the level of his sister Breege's love for both him and his rival, Bugler. Breege sees "the wrong of years and the recent wrongs" fuel each other as Bugler comes...

Down by the River is a newly reissued novel from Edna O’Brien, the author of Girl—“one of the most celebrated writers in the English language” (NPR’s Weekend Edition). Set in the author’s native Ireland, a powerful and passionate novel about a young girl who becomes pregnant by her father—a situation made worse when it becomes fodder for the gossip mill of church, state, and the town square.

Collects short stories depicting restless, searching people set in Dublin, London, and New York.

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...

"Edna O'Brien is not only an exceptionally talented writer, but along with Penelope Mortimer and Doris Lessing, directs a sharpened intelligence on the ambiguous problems of the young woman who is just as unhappy in the actuality of being free as the mystique of being trapped This novel, which is not part of her Country Girl -- Lonely Girl trilogy (the third of which is yet to appear in this country), has none of their raffish humor although the physical...

"A Pagan Place is Edna O'Brien's true novel of Ireland. Here she returns to that uniquely wonderful, terrible, peculiar place she once called home and writes not only of a life there--of the child becoming a woman -- but of the Irish experience out of which that life arises -- perhaps more pointedly than in any of her other works. This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of druids in the woods, of unknown babies in the womb, of mischievous...

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...