Yesterday's Weather
Includes Taking Pictures and Other Stories
-
- €5.99
-
- €5.99
Publisher Description
First publication of a new collection of the Booker Prize-winner's stories including those from her most recent hardback 'Taking Pictures'.
In Yesterday's Weather, Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright presents a series of deeply moving stories about women stirred, bothered, or fascinated by men they cannot understand, or understand too well. Enright's characters are haunted by the ghosts of the lives they might have led - lit by new flames, old flames, and flames that are guttering out. A woman's one night stand is illuminated by dreams of a young boy on a cliff road, another's is thwarted by an swarm of somnolent bees. A pregnant woman is stuck in a slow lift with a tactile American stranger, a naked mother changes a nappy in a hotel bedroom, and waits for her husband to come back from the bar. This collection includes some of Enright's best loved stories as well as her latest works. These are sharp, vivid tales of loss and yearning, of surrender to responsibilities or to unexpected delight; all share the unsettling, dislocated reality, the subversive wit and awkward tenderness that have marked Anne Enright as one of our most thrillingly gifted writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this overstuffed collection from Booker Prize winner Enright (The Gathering), the gems are overshadowed by the sheer number of stories (there are 31). Enright's talent lies in her ability to tweak an ordinary situation and create something that is at once unique and universal: two wives coming to different conclusions about their husbands' infidelities in "Until the Girl Died" and "The Portable Virgin," an examination of elevator and pregnancy etiquette in "Shaft" or the permutations of sexual desire in "Revenge." Other standouts such as "Little Sister" and "Felix" resonate because of their tight focus. In the former, the narrator pieces together her dead sister's life and realizes "It was all just bits. I really wanted it to add up to something, but it didn't." In "Felix," Enright riffs on Lolita and creates an endearing and repulsive middle-aged woman narrator who has an affair with a neighborhood boy. But too often Enright's characters more often than not female, first-person narrators bleed into one another until their stories become jumbled in the reader's mind, as another unhappy wife or mother laments her situation.
