A Pagan Place

A woman recalls her rural Irish home—and the reason for her escape—in this poetic novel by "one of the great writers . . . in the English-speaking world" (The New York Times).

In A Pagan Place, Edna O'Brien returns to Ireland, the uniquely wonderful, terrible, and peculiar place she once called home. After leaving to join a religious community in Belgium, a young woman remembers her childhood on the western coast of Ireland. She reflects on the rituals of rural life, the people she encountered, and the enchanting beauty of the landscape.


This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of mischievous girls and druids in the woods. As the impressions of her former home intensify, her mind turns to the shocking event that led to her departure.

"O'Brien's evocative prose shows the chilling hold that history and the dead clamp on the living." —Paul Gray, Time
"O'Brien brings together the earthy and the delicately poetic: she has the soul of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf." —Ray Sawhill, Newsweek