Saints and Sinners: Stories

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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, waits in the lobby of a posh Dublin hotel-expecting to meet a celebrated poet while reflecting on the great love who disappointed her. The Irish workers of "The Shovel Kings" have pipe dreams of becoming millionaires in London, but long for their quickly changing homeland-exiles in both places. "Green Georgette" is a searing anatomy of class, through the eyes of a little girl; "Old Wounds" illuminates the importance of family and memory in old age. In language that is always bold and vital, Edna O'Brien pays tribute to the universal forces that rule our lives.

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The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue

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The Country Girls

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Meet Kate and Baba, two young Irish country girls who have spent their childhood together. As they leave the safety of their convent school in search of life and love in the big city, they struggle to maintain their somewhat tumultuous relationship. Kate, dreamy and romantic, yearns for true love, while Baba just wants to experience the life of a single girl. Although they set out to conquer the world together, as their lives take unexpected turns, Kate and Baba must ultimately learn to find their own way.

"It's a difficult trip, this coming of age . . . O'Brien tells it with love and outrage, compassion and contempt." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

"A treasure . . . powerful . . . intelligent . . . ironic." (The New York Times Book Review)

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Night: A Novel

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780618126897
• Fit out: New
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Wild Decembers

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Wild Decembers begins lushly with a prologue that's as much a prose poem as a map, full of cautionary demarcations. "Cloontha it is called--a locality within the bending of an arm," Edna O'Brien writes of her setting in western Ireland. With its "relics of battles of the long ago" and memories of the potato famine still in the soil, it's clear that "the enemy can come at any hour." This time, the enemy appears in the form of Mick Bugler--described variously as a "dark horse," a "caveman," and "the Shepherd"--who has returned from Australia to claim his late uncle's farm. To Joseph Brennan, as native to tiny Cloontha as its relics, the stranger who has taken possession of the farm next to his is briefly a novelty, less briefly a friend, and finally excites in him a fear and a love of boundaries that proves murderous.

O'Brien's Irish hero recites biblical, Greek, and Irish history, mingling them until the world's story, as he sees it, is a tribute to immovable men such as Moses, who he swears settled Cloontha for the likes of him. Unmarried and devoted to the sister with whom he lives, Joseph is so blind with love for the life and land he and his forebears have earned--and with the will to preserve them against the barest change--that his own inability to give way is his undoing. Inevitably, his sister Breege and Bugler fall in love, but, in a landscape where everything is a contest of ownership and men measure their stature against a woman's fidelity, this love thrives exuberantly, though not lastingly, like "flowers that are hatched in the snows." In her 11th novel, O'Brien gives as good as Shakespeare: there's a little of Iago in the town fool, a deliciously nasty cripple named Crock, and a little of Ophelia in pretty Breege. The author means to break your heart, and her startling and redemptive prose leaves you as nostalgic as Joseph Brennan for what might have been, as eager for the next chapter as you are disquieted by its implications. --Amy Grace Loyd

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James Joyce (Lives)

Description

In this volume in the "Lives" series, Edna O'Brien relates how she shares a love for the music and precision of words with the writer she has seen as guru for all of her life.

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Although Edna O'Brien has never trafficked in James Joyce's head-over-heels brand of high modernism, she does have a couple of characteristics in common with her great predecessor. After all, both authors engaged in a profoundly ambivalent excoriation of their native Ireland. And while O'Brien's sexual politics can make Joyce seem like a fusty Edwardian by comparison, both novelists got a certain amount of flack for their erotic frankness. So this latest match from the Penguin Lives series seems like a good one--and largely lives up to its promise. O'Brien makes no pretense of competing with Richard Ellmann's immense, magisterial portrait. Instead she has concocted in James Joyce something that resembles one of her own novels: a spirited, lyrical, and acerbic narrative that just happens to feature the author of Ulysses in the starring role.

Having experienced the constrictions of Irish life firsthand, O'Brien is particularly good on Joyce's downwardly mobile childhood. Was his resulting hatred of his native land exaggerated? Apparently not:

No one who has not lived in such straitened and hideous circumstances can understand the battering of that upbringing. All the more because they had come down in the world, a tumble from semi-gentility, servants, a nicely laid table, cut glasses, a piano, the accoutrements of middle-class life, relegated to the near slums in Mountjoy Square, the gaunt spectral mansions in which children sat like mice in the gaping doorways.

The author also gives a vivid sense of her subject's devotion to his art, an altar upon which he happily sacrificed his family, health, friends, and even his eyesight. She is stubborn in her defense of Joyce's sublime irresponsibility, which she ascribes to all writers: "It is a paradox that while wrestling with the language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glisteningly depict." O'Brien's own wrestling match in James Joyce has, to be honest, its share of pins and minor pratfalls: there are some embarrassing repetitions and punctuational oddities, and her occasional assimilation of Joyce's own language is an awkward (if heartfelt) form of homage. Still, when she sticks to her own inflections, her account of this "funnominal man" is an eminently readable and entertaining dose of Irish bitters. --James Marcus

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