Anne Enright Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Wig My Father Wore (1995)
  2. What Are You Like? (2000)
  3. The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002)
  4. The Gathering (2007)
  5. The Forgotten Waltz (2011)
  6. The Green Road (2015)
  7. Actress (2020)

Collections

  1. The Portable Virgin (1991)
  2. Taking Pictures (2008)
  3. Yesterday’s Weather (2008)

Anthologies edited

  1. The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story (2010)

Non fiction

  1. Making Babies (2004)
  2. Babies (2017)
  3. No Authority (2019)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Anne Enright Books Overview

The Wig My Father Wore

The second novel to be published in America by widely acclaimed Irish author Anne Enright, The Wig My Father Wore is a spry, hilarious novel about parents, love, religion, and the absurdities of them all. Grace is a young Dubliner who works on a television show called Love Quiz. Her father is going benignly senile, but her life otherwise seems fairly solid. When Stephen arrives on her doorstep, however, Grace has no idea what she’s in for. Stephen explains that he is an angel, a former bridge builder who committed suicide in 1934. He has been sent back to earth as all suicides are to guide lost souls. Grace does not take this personally at first, but eventually she has to face the idea that things are not so easy, and that her greatest intimacy is with this supernatural creature. As Grace begins to take stock of her life and the prospect of caring enough about something to fight for it, The Wig My Father Wore takes us on a moving, surreal romp through Catholicism, parents, and the reclamation of love from the twin modern evils of cynicism and the detritus of pop culture.

What Are You Like?

Anne Enright is one of the most exciting writers of Ireland’s younger generation, a beguiling storyteller The Seattle Times has praised for ‘the…
way she writes about women…
their adventures to know who they are through sex, despair, wit and single minded courage.’ In What Are You Like??, Maria Delahunty, raised by her grieving father after her mother died during childbirth, finds herself in her twenties awash in nameless longing and in love with the wrong man. Going through his things, she finds a photograph that will end up unraveling a secret more devastating than her father’s long mourning, but more pregnant with possibility. Moving between Dublin, New York, and London, What Are You Like?? is a breathtaking novel of twins and irretrievable losses, of a woman haunted by her missing self, and of our helplessness against our fierce connection to our origins. What Are You Like?? has been selected as a finalist for the Whitbread Award. It is a novel, Newsday wrote, that ‘announces Enright’s excellence as though it were stamped on the cover in boldface.’ ‘Richly descriptive…
Slightly surreal, revelatory images are hallmarks of Enright’s writing, which beguiles throughout.’ Melanie Rehak, US Weekly ‘Cool, wicked, and quintessentially Irish…
Anne Enright tells a sharp, stylish tale in an accent all her own.’ Annabel Lyon, The National Post Toronto

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

Anne Enright’s novels What Are You Like? and The Wig My Father Wore have established her as a stunning young writer of international caliber. This award winning author now delivers an astonishing, rich tour de force based on the life of a woman truly larger than life: Eliza Lynch, the nineteenth century Irishwoman who became Paraguay’s Eva Peron. Beautiful, sophisticated, and adventurous, Eliza Lynch met Francisco Solano Lopez in Paris when she was nineteen and he was in Europe to recruit engineers for the first railroad in South America. He left for Paraguay several months later with a pregnant Eliza beside him. Reviled by Asuncion society and her lover’s family, Eliza built herself a fine house, constructed a national theater for Paraguay, and had her son baptized, although he was a bast*ard. In less than a decade, Lopez became dictator of the nation and plunged Paraguay into a conflict that would kill over half its population. By then Eliza had become notorious as both the angel of the battlefield, inspiring the troops, and the demon driving Lopez’s ambition. At one time the richest woman in the world, she was said to lead the retreat of the army in a black coach followed by carriages conveying her enormous wardrobe of Paris gowns. When Lopez was killed by the Brazilian army, she buried him in a shallow grave dug with her own hands. Anne Enright has written a gorgeous, deeply resonant novel about this extraordinary woman, following the arc of a life from the joyous sting of meeting Lopez, to burying him alone in a Paraguayan Golgotha. It is a novel of epic love and epic destruction, and an accomplishment that brings Anne Enright’s immense talent to full flower.

The Gathering

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn’t the drink that killed him although that certainly helped it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother’s house, in the winter of 1968. His sister, Veronica was there then, as she is now: keeping the dead man company, just for another little while. The ‘Gathering’ is a family epic, condensed and clarified through the remarkable lens of Anne Enright’s unblinking eye. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars. The ‘Gathering’ sends fresh blood through the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. As in all Anne Enright’s work, fiction and non fiction, this is a book of daring, wit and insight: her distinctive intelligence twisting the world a fraction, and giving it back to us in a new and unforgettable light.

The Portable Virgin

A collection of stories whose characters interpret their lives through different unusual languages visual, numerical, linguistic, sexual and through honesty, humour and polemical imagination. The author was awarded the best first in English at Trinity College, Dublin, since Oscar Wilde.

Taking Pictures

The new book from the winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize

Yesterday’s Weather

Man Booker winner Anne Enright’s story collectionYesterday s Weatheris a series of moving glimpses into the lives of ordinary men and women struggling with the bonds of love, family, and community in an increasingly disconnected world. It exhibits the arresting images and subversive wit that mark Enright as one of the most thrillingly gifted writers of our time. Yesterday s Weathershows 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 cuckolds her rich husband with an old college friend& 8212a madman who refuses his pills, disappears for weeks on end, and plays the piano like a dream. Still more startling than loss or deception are the ways in which people respond: a wife raging at her husband s infidelity must weigh the real stakes after his affair takes a tragic turn; confronted with a similar situation, a woman decides to cheat with, rather than against, her man. Sharp, tender, never predictable, their sum is a vibrant tapestry of people struggling to find contentment with one another& 8212and with themselves.

The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story

This is a dazzling collection of stories, which moves from the classic Irish short story of Frank O’Connor and Mary Lavin, to contemporary writers like Aidan Mathews and Claire Keegan, via stories by Samuel Beckett, Colm Toibin, Maeve Brennan, Bernard MacLaverty. It includes a pithy and passionate introduction by Anne Enright.

Making Babies

Anne Enright, one of Ireland’s most remarkable writers, has just had two babies: a girl and a boy. Her new book, ‘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. Easily confiding and full of advice from the front line, the book contains sections on buggies ‘All women with buggies look like they are on welfare’, second pregnancies ‘No one gives a toss about your second pregnancy. Get on with it’, evolution ‘Humans give birth in pain so that they can’t run away, afterwards’, not to mention how to get trolleyed while breastfeeding ‘There are good reasons not to feed a baby while drunk, not all of them aesthetic’. ‘Making Babies‘ is an antidote to the po faced, polemical ‘How to’ baby books, but it also bears a visceral and dreamlike witness to the first years of parenthood. It is written from the heart of change: urgent, funny, passionate and wry. Anne Enright brings her entire self to this account of her life, as new life came out of it. She wrote it down as it happened, because, for these months and years, it is impossible for a woman to lie.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment