The Forgotten Waltz

The Forgotten Waltz is a memory of desire: a recollection of the bewildering speed of attraction, the irreparable slip into longing, that reads with breathtaking immediacy. In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. A woman recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life." As the city outside comes to a halt, she remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and the stillness and vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, she awaits the arrival on her doorstep of his fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie. In The Forgotten Waltz, Enright is at the height of her powers. This is Anne Enright's tour de force, a novel of intelligence, passion, and real distinction.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2020 Man Booker Prize-winner and bestselling author Anne Enright's latest--a brilliant and moving novel about fame, sexual power, and a daughter's search to understand her mother's hidden truths. This is the story of Irish theatre legend, Katherine O'Dell, as written by her daughter Norah. It tells of early stardom in Hollywood, of highs and lows on the stages of Dublin and London's West End. Katherine's life is a grand performance, with young Norah watching from the wings. But this romance between mother and daughter cannot survive Katherine's past, or the world's damage. As Norah uncovers her mother's secrets, she acquires a few of her own. Then, fame turns to infamy when Katherine decides to commit a bizarre crime. Actress is about a daughter's search for the truth: the dark secret in the bright star, and what drove Katherine finally mad. Brilliantly capturing the glamour of post-war America and the shabbiness of 1970s Dublin, Actress is an intensely moving, disturbing novel about mothers and daughters and the men in their lives. A scintillating examination of the corrosive nature of celebrity, it is also a sad and triumphant tale of freedom from bad love, and from the avid gaze of the crowd.

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)

From the author of the Man Booker Prize— winning literary sensation and long-time Globe and Mail bestseller The Gathering, comes a dazzling, seductive new collection of stories. “Anne Enright’s style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion’s; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro’s; . . . her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O’Brien’s.” — Colm Tóibín A rich collection of sharp, vivid stories of loss and yearning, of the ordinary defeats and unexpected delights that grow out of the bonds between husbands and wives, mothers and children, and intimate strangers. Bringing together in a single elegant edition new stories as well as a selection of stories never before published in Canada (from her UK published The Portable Virgin, 1991), Yesterday’s Weather exhibits the unsettling, carefully drawn reality, the subversive wit, and the awkward tenderness that mark Anne Enright as one of the most thrillingly gifted writers of our time.

By the Booker Award-winning bestselling author of The Gathering, The Green Road is Anne Enright's virtuoso new novel, her most compelling and powerful to date A darkly glinting novel set mainly in a small town 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 grow up in the West of Ireland, in a world that is about to change. When her oldest brother, Dan, announces he will enter the priesthood, young Hanna watches her mother retreat in sorrow to her bed. In the years that follow, three of the children leave home for lives they could never have imagined. Dan for the frenzy of New York under the shadow of AIDS; Emmet for the backlands of Mali where he learns the fragility of love and order; actress Hanna for modern-day Dublin and the trials of motherhood. In her early old age, their difficult, wonderful mother, Rosaleen, decides to sell the family home, the house she was born in and where she raised her own family, with all its ghosts and memories. Her adult children visit for Christmas, carrying with them the complications of their present lives and the old needs of childhood as they are brought face to face with their mother's ageing and the effects her decision will have on them all. In this extraordinary and intimate story of one family, Enright has also given us a portrait of our times. This is a major work of fiction by one of the most exciting writers of our time.

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.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'An unadulterated delight...suffused with a sense of love and very, very funny' Maggie O'Farrell It's 2004 and Anne Enright, one of Ireland's most remarkable writers, has just had two babies: a girl and a boy. Making Babies, is the intimate, engaging, and very funny record of the journey from early pregnancy to age two. Written in dispatches, typed with a sleeping baby in the room, it has the rush of good news - full of the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of it all. An antidote to the high-minded, polemical 'How-to' baby manuals, Making Babies also bears a visceral and dreamlike witness to the first years of parenthood. Anne Enright wrote the truth of it as it happened, because, for these months and years, it is impossible for a woman to lie.

Discover Man Booker winner Anne Enright's first collection of short stories. 'Elegant, scrupulously poised, always intelligent and, not least, original' Angela Carter The characters in Anne Enright's fierce and witty first collection of stories stand at an oblique angle to society. Full of desire, but out of kilter, their response to a dislocated reality is mutinous, wild, unforgettable. 'Quirky, subversive, original wit and an imaginative linguistic fluency' Irish Times