The Green Road
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4.0 • 24 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
By the Booker Award-winning and bestselling author of The Gathering, The Green Road is Anne Enright's virtuoso new novel, her most compelling and powerful to date.
A darkly glinting novel set mainly in a small town on Ireland's Atlantic coast, The Green Road is a story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion—a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them.
The children of Rosaleen Madigan grow up in the West of Ireland, in a world that is about to change. When her oldest brother, Dan, announces he will enter the priesthood, young Hanna watches her mother retreat in sorrow to her bed. In the years that follow, three of the children leave home for lives they could never have imagined. Dan for the frenzy of New York under the shadow of AIDS; Emmet for the backlands of Mali where he learns the fragility of love and order; actress Hanna for modern-day Dublin and the trials of motherhood. In her early old age, their difficult, wonderful mother, Rosaleen, decides to sell the family home, the house she was born in and where she raised her own family, with all its ghosts and memories. Her adult children visit for Christmas, carrying with them the complications of their present lives and the old needs of childhood as they are brought face to face with their mother's aging and the effects her decision will have on them all.
In this extraordinary and intimate story of one family, Enright has also given us a portrait of our times. This is a major work of fiction by one of the most exciting writers of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The eponymous road of Enright's flawless novel is in County Clare in Ireland, running from the impoverished farm of handsome Pat Madigan in Boolavaun, to a house called Ardeevin, where he wooed Rosaleen Considine, daughter of the town's leading family. Pat and Rosaleen marry and have four children. A volatile drama queen, Rosaleen is the fulcrum about which her children warily move. Even as they mature and flee from her embrace, she exists in their heads, where they continue to blame her for their bad fortunes. In 1980, Rosaleen takes to her bed when Dan, the eldest and her favorite, announces his intention to become a priest. She is even more aggrieved when he abandons the priesthood for the art community in New York in the 1990s and eventually allows his true sexual nature to emerge in a series of ardent gay trysts. Enright (winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering) writes of this time and place with crystalline clarity. The tone is much different in the chapters set in Ardeevin, where the lilt of Irish vernacular permeates the dialogue. Meanwhile Emmet, the second son, is engaged in relief work in Mali, trying to retain his sanity as the death toll from famine mounts and his girlfriend lavishes her love on a mangy dog. Hanna, his sister, is an aspiring actress and a drunk who confronts reality at 37, bitterly ambivalent about being the mother of an unplanned baby. The fourth sibling, Constance, who has married well and lives with her happy family in Limmerick, is her mother's dogsbody and the unappreciated provider. This novel is a vibrant family portrait, both pitiless and compassionate, witty and stark, of simple people living quiet lives of anguish, sometimes redeemed by moments of grace.
