The Love Object
Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien
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- € 12,99
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- € 12,99
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The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019.
'Edna O'Brien writes the most beautiful, aching stories of any writer, anywhere.' Alice Munro
Spanning five decades of writing, and winning the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, The Love Object collects the most luminous stories by Edna O'Brien that have bewitched generation after generation. Here you will find tales of families, feuds, enchantment, despair, and the manifold bonds of love. There are stories about the tension between country and city life, the instinct towards escape and nostalgia for home; always crafted in shimmering, unique prose.
This ebook features the first chapter of Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel, Girl, published by Faber in September 2019 and available to pre-order now.
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O'Brien, who introduced an Irish female perspective to the 1960s literary landscape, has produced stories over the last half-century that resonate with charm and acerbity, lyricism and terseness, nostalgia and brute force. Her early stories depict an Ireland of isolated villages and poor mountain farms where, in a moment, dreams turn to hopelessness, innocence to shame. Autobiographical tales feature mothers recalling days in America, schoolgirls bristling at convent education, and country lasses escaping to London. In "Irish Revel," a farm girl bicycles into town for a party only to find herself moving furniture and cooking dinner. In "Sister Imelda," the title character returns from university lonely and apart, an exile "in the mind." Spirited Eily of "A Scandalous Woman" ends up trapped in a spiritless marriage, and the protagonist of "The Conner Girls," like Chekhovian figurines, are trapped by their own lack of will. "Mrs. Reinhardt" and "A Rose in New York" exemplify stories exploring relationships between women. Men are mostly observed by women, as in "The Love Object," which details a London divorc e's affair with a married man. "Brother" depicts a particularly vicious man through his sister's murderous eyes. "The Shovel Kings" shows sympathy for Irish laborers in England. John Banville's introduction to the collection highlights O'Brien's technique as well as her Irish roots. The stories validate his admiration O'Brien's self-described gallery of "strange" and "sacrificial" Irish women is indispensable.