In 1960, Edna O'Brien published "The Country Girls," her first novel, which so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien, married with two sons, was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentie[...]

I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited 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 e[...]

From eccentric Joanna's boarding house, predatory Baba roams Dublin looking for men to give her a good time - and dragging with her a reluctant Cait, worrying about her figure and wanting to talk about books. Then she meets dark, long-faced Eugene Gaillard, a film director, and for a while Cait's ro[...]

With her inimitable gift for describing the workings of the heart and mind, Edna O'Brien introduces us to a vivid new cast of restless, searching people who-whether in the Irish countryside or London or New York-remind us of our own humanity.
In "Send My Roots Rain," Miss Gilhooley, a librarian,[...]

"Delicious...whollv original...sensitive as a harp string...captures the vigilance of childhood and reproduces, eerily intact, its heightened sensations."
--Newsday
From the acclaimed author of "Country Girl: A Memoir"
Kate and Baba are two ambitious Irish country girls in search of life[...]

As a companion set to its existing surveys of British and American poetry and literature, the British Library is releasing a 3CD collection devoted to Irish poets and writers.[...]

Kate and Baba are in London, playing out the tragicomedy of their married lives to its surprisingly level-headed conclusion. Kate, feeling trapped in her grey stone house with her increasingly cold husband, tearfully looks for her dreams of romance elsewhere. And when Eugene takes terrible, implacab[...]

DOWN BY THE RIVER begins, deceptively, in an idyllic rural setting somewhere in Ireland. By the end, its consequences have addressed and divided the political and judicial fabric of the nation. A crime of passion results in an emotional battlefield for one and all, with opposing factions taking mili[...]