'It was a tough, wiry wig with plenty of personality. It rode around on his head like an animal. It was a vigorous brown. I was very fond of it as a child. I thought that it liked me back.'

Anne Enright's extraordinary first novel is narrated by Grace, a TV producer, whose life is transfigured when she answers the door to a fully-fledged angel. Stephen was a bridge-builder in Canada before he killed himself, but now that he has come to stay with Grace he spends the night hanging by the neck in her shower, to help himself think. Needless, to say, she falls in love, moving steadily from the spiritual to the anatomical. Meanwhile as her TV day job on the 'Love Quiz' begins to spiral out of control, on the other side of her life is her father, benign, bewigged and stricken by a stroke -apparently mad but probably the sanest person in her life. As the three worlds meet and merge in a forest of contradictions, we watch Grace take the pacific path from cynicism to innocence, as all around her the novel thinders to a conclusion.

Brilliant, breathless and very biological, this is a moving and darkly funny story of sex, death and reproduction by one of Ireland's finest writers.

About the Author
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and seven novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gais Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature. She is also the recipient of the 2022 Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award.


Book Information
ISBN 9780749397159
Author Anne Enright
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 159g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 14mm