“I am sorry. I cannot invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.”In her latest novel, Anne Enwright writes with wit and honesty about the Madigan family, who are called home to Western Ireland for Christmas by their cold and difficult mother Rosaleen when she unexpectedly decides to sell the family home.
Set over three decades and three continents the believable and imperfect characters will make you wince, laugh, and think about your own family relationships and dynamics….
Dan, the golden child of the family, sends his mother to her sick bed when he announces his intention to become a priest. We revisit him later in New York during the AIDS epidemic of the 1990’s, his sexuality an unspoken but open secret amongst his siblings. Emmet becomes a charity worker in various Third World war-torn countries. Hanna has a young baby, a drinking problem and post-natal depression, and Constance is a slave to her family with health issues of her own. Mother Rosaleen is needy, haughty, and manipulative, and welds a maternal power over her children that turns every sentence into a weapon.
Recently made the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, Enright was born in Dublin in 1962. After a career in television production, she took up writing full time in 1991. Her novel The Gathering won the Man Booker prize for Fiction in 2007 and the Irish Novel of the Year. With The Green Road, Irish author Anne Enright has again produced an astute novel about an engagingly dysfunctional Irish family.
Posted by Katrina H
Catalogue link: The Green Road
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