The Green Road
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3.9 • 16 Ratings
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- €4.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2016
Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award
Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the Irish Novel of the Year 2015
Hanna, Dan, Constance and Emmet return to the west coast of Ireland for a final family Christmas in the home their mother is about to sell. As the feast turns to near painful comedy, a last, desperate act from Rosaleen - a woman who doesn't quite know how to love her children - forces them to confront the weight of family ties and the road that brought them home.
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This rich, thought-provoking novel centres on petulant ageing Irish matriarch Rosaleen and her four adult children. Author Anne Enright—who won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering—tells each character’s story in perfect capsule episodes: Dan in New York during the AIDS crisis, Emmet doing relief work in Africa, Hanna struggling with a new baby, Constance dealing with a medical scare and Rosaleen herself deciding to sell the family home. As this wonderfully imperfect, achingly real group reunite for Christmas, Enright skillfully portrays their disappointments, grudges and intimacies. The Green Road is a bittersweet and beautiful read.
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.
Customer Reviews
The Green Road
The writing and obvious knowledge of Irish family life, some of its characters and characteristics, are superbly presented.
The depth of understanding of modern life abroad and The Irish in that context is also wonderfully obvious.
Its very much an excerpt of real family life in Ireland but in my view it doesn't do anything or actually go anywhere really. I believe it leaves far too much up in the air and also i think it attempts to make the reader decipher a little too much at times. I found this
unpleasantly onerous.
I thought the book was ok but i must admit that it just was not my cup of tea so perhaps my view sounds a little unfair.