Country Girl - Hardcover

O' Brien, Edna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571269435 ISBN 13: 9780571269433

Publisher: Faber and Faber Non Fiction, 2012

Synopsis

While Edna O'Brien's brilliant debut novel The Country Girls (1960) scandalized Ireland and was promptly banned, she has come to be regarded as one of that country's finest writers. In this frank memoir, she looks back with warmth and humour on a passionate life lived to the full. In the sparkling, evocative prose that characterizes her fiction, she recalls her rural childhood and family life, her writing, her travels, and her encounters with pop stars, Hollywood legends and literary lions. Off-mint.

About this title

About the Author

Since her debut novel The Country Girls Edna O'Brien has written over twenty works of fiction along with a biography of James Joyce and Lord Byron. She is the recipient of many awards including the Irish Pen Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Art's Gold Medal and the Ulysses Medal. Born and raised in the west of Ireland she has lived in London for many years.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The doyenne of contemporary Irish letters did not enjoy a straight-line rise to international fame and critical regard. In fact, for many years, O’Brien’s novels were banned in her native Ireland for indecency. Now, of course, in more relaxed and open-minded times, her fiction (brilliant short stories as well as novels) is seen for what it always was, richly illuminating and, yes, candid depictions of women’s needs and desires, rendered with no sentimentality or salaciousness. Born into a rural family that once knew wealth but at the time of her birth had only memories of better times, Edna had a precocious interest in being a writer. Convent schooling is remembered in this absorbing memoir as “dour.” Relatively sophisticated Dublin beckoned. She answered the call by apprenticing in a chemist’s shop in the capital, all the while “convinced she would meet poets and that one day she would be admitted into the world of letters.” She and the husband she had acquired moved to London (her marriage was to prove untenable), and there she began writing in earnest and with success. At this point in her remembrance, her memoir shifts into something different in substance and tone. Her unembellished Irish upbringing gives way to the glamour of the celebrity life she led in London. Still, her book is a beautifully expressed testament to a writer’s tenacity. --Brad Hooper

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber Non Fiction
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0571269435
• ISBN 13: 9780571269433
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 339