Anne Enright Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Anne Enright
Anne Enright was born October 11, 1962 in Dublin, Ireland. She was educated at St. Louis High School, Rathmines. She won an international scholarship to Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia. Here she studied for an International Baccalaureate for two years. Then she finished her BA in English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin.

Anne started writing in earnest when she got an electric typewriter for her 21st birthday.

Anne was a television director and producer for RTE in Dublin for six years, and produced the RTE programme “Nighthawks” for four years. Then she worked in children’s programming for two years and would write on the weekend. She started writing full time in the year 1993. Her full time writing career came about when she left television because of a breakdown.

She is married to Martin Murphy, who was the director of the Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoghaire. They have a son and daughter together.

“The Portable Virgin”, her first collection of short stories, won the Rooney Prize. “The Forgotten Waltz” won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and “The Gathering” won the Man Booker Prize. She was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction.

“The Gathering” is a stand alone novel that was released in 2007. The nine surviving kids of the Hegarty clan gather together in Dublin for the wake of Liam, their wayward brother. It was not the drink which killed him, although that definitely helped. It was what happened to him when he was a boy in his grandma’s house, during the winter of 1968. Veronica, his sister, was there then, like she is now: keeping the dead guy company, only for another little while.

“The Gathering” is a family epic, which is clarified and condensed through Anne Enright’s remarkable and unblinking eye. It’s also a sexual history: tracing the line of redemption and hurt through three generations: beginning with the grandma (Ada Merriman) showing how family secrets fester and memories warp.

Anne delivers a novel about disappointment and love, about limitless desire and thwarted lust, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

“The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch” is a stand alone novel that was released in 2002. A novel that is based on the life of one nineteenth century Irishwoman who became Paraguay’s Eva Peron.

Spring of 1854 in Paris, Francisco Solano Lopez came to Eliza Lynch’s house to improve his French. That’s what he claimed anyway. She was nineteen, already with an ex-husband, and he was the young son of Paraguay’s dictator living in Europe to recruit engineers for South America’s first railroad. And by the time that he returned to Asuncidon in the year 1855, Eliza was already pregnant with his first kid.

Lopez, in under a decade, plunged Paraguay into a conflict which would kill more than half of its population. By that time Eliza was quite notorious, as both the demon whose rapacious appetites drove Lopez’s fatal ambition and the angel of the battlefield inspiring all the troops. This is her tale, in which Anne explores in an artful way the power of beauty and the beauty of power, and finds them remarkably very similar while neither one leads to a good conclusion.

“The Forgotten Waltz” is a stand alone novel that was released in 2011. This is a memory of desire: a recollection of the bewildering speed of attraction, that irreparable slip into longing, which reads with breathtaking immediacy. In Terenure, this pleasant suburb of Dublin, during the winter of 2009, it’s snowed. A woman remembers the trail of happenstance and lust which brought her to fall for “the love of her life”.

She remembers, while the city outside comes to a halt, the days of their love affair in some hotel room or another: these long afternoons made blank by denial and bliss.

Now, while the silent streets and the vertigo and stillness of the falling snow make the day more luminous and filled with possibility, she awaits the arrival on her doorstep of Evie, his fragile twelve year old daughter.

“The Green Road” is a stand alone novel that was released in 2015. A shattering novel set in a small town on Ireland’s Atlantic coast. This is a story about fracture and family, selfishness and compassion. A book about the gaps in the human heart and the ways we strive to fill them.

Spanning thirty years, “The Green Road” tells the story of Roasleen, the matriarch of the Madigans, a family right on the cusp of either coming together or falling apart irreparably. While they grow up, her four kids leave the west of Ireland for lives that they could never have imagined in Dublin, Mali, New York, and West Africa.

During her early old age their wonderful, difficult mom announces that she has decided to sell the house and divide up the money. Her adult kids come back for one last Christmas, with the feeling their childhoods are getting erased, and their personal histories bought and sold.

A profoundly moving work about this family’s desperate effort to recover the relationships they have lost and forge the ones they never had.

One of the Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st century. It was nominated for Best Novel by Costa Book Awards, Booker Prize, Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Women’s Prize for Fiction, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards.

“Actress” is a stand alone novel that was released in 2020. Katherine O’Dell is a legend of Irish theater. Each moment of her life is a performance, with Norah (her daughter) waiting in the wings. With alcohol, age, and dimming stardom, however, her grip on reality grows fitful. Fueled by a proud and long simmering rage, she commits this strange crime.

While Norah’s role slowly changes to Katherine’s caregiver, protector, and finally legacy-keeper, she goes back and revisits her mom’s life of fiercely kept secrets. Norah also confronts the secrets of her own emotional and sexual coming of age. “Actress” weaves together two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, touching a timely and raw nerve.