Edna Obrien Boeken

O'Brien's latest novel charts the quick and critical demise of relations between "the warring sons of warring sons" fighting over inherited land in the countryside of western Ireland.

The New York Times Book Review hailed The Country Girls, the first book in Edna O'Brien's critically acclaimed trilogy, as "Powerful. Intelligent. Ironic. A treasure."The Lonely Girl continues the story of childhood friends Kate and Baba, now both twenty-one, as they navigate the rocky, sometimes treacherous pathways of urban life. With hearts as big as Dublin, and hopes as bright as new pennies, they move bravely and eagerly toward the future. Yet the two couldn't be more different. Kate toils in a grocery shop and lives out her romantic fantasies in books. Baba entertains more earthbound dreams. Their principles—and friendship—are tested when Kate meets a dashing married man, and discovers the exhilaration of passion...and the consequences of falling in love.A novel that combines the teeming ethos of big-city life with the ambitions and yearnings of two emerging young women, The Lonely Girl is a stellar achievement from one of Ireland's finest storytellers.

I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, success and failure, fame and slaughter, to have read in the newspapers that as a writer I was past my sell-by date, yet regardless, to go on writing and reading, to be lucky enough to live in these two intensities that have buttressed my whole life.

If one pairing of author and subject can, on its own, prove the unique merit of the Penguin Lives dynamic, it is Edna O'Brien writing on James Joyce. Of the great works of the twentieth century, his Ulysses stands alone as the groundbreaking, immeasurably influential masterpiece. Edna O'Brien, award-winning novelist and chronicler of Irish life in our day, approaches James Joyce as only a fellow countryman can in her beautiful, poetic rendering of his life. From his early days as the rambunctious Jesuit school student, one of ten children, through his flight to Europe and the success, love and despair he would experience there, to his final, frustrated days as "a poor old man in a long overcoat, an eyepatch and a stick, stones in his pocket to keep off marauding dogs, " O'Brien's deft, gentle, inciteful prose captures the essence of this troubled literary master.

Edna O'Brien's classic novel NIGHT takes us through one long, sleepless night with Mary Hooligan. From the center of her bed, "a four poster no less," Mary recalls her fertile past, from her childhood in the Irish countryside to the love affairs she has confronted since leaving for English shores. Wistful, wanton, this erotic reverie shows O'Brien to be one of the foremost heirs to modernism. "Very few writers use language as richly and sensuously . . . There are passages here worthy of Joyce" (Library Journal).

This novel tells the story of two Irish girls, Caithleen Brady and Bridget Brennan, and their escape from a life filled with countryside and convent to the allure and the crowds, lights and noise of Dublin.