Edna O’Brien stands as one of the foremost chroniclers of the female experience in the twentieth century. Her body of work, encompassing novels, short stories, and plays, delves deeply into the intimate lives of her characters. O’Brien fearlessly tackled themes of female sexuality and societal constraints, earning both acclaim and controversy. Her distinctive voice and profound understanding of human psychology make her an enduring literary figure.
From eccentric Joanna's boarding house, predatory Baba roams Dublin looking for men to give her a good time - and dragging with her a reluctant Cait, worrying about her figure and wanting to talk about books. Then she meets dark, long-faced Eugene Gaillard, a film director, and for a while Cait's romantic dreams seem to be fulfilled. But Eugene Gaillard is a Protestant divorce, and when Cait's drunkard father gets to hear of it, he summons a lynch mob.
The acclaimed author describes her convent school education in Ireland, the scandal that ensued upon the publication of her first novel, and the wild 1960s parties that introduced her to people from all walks of life.
O'Brien's latest novel charts the quick and critical demise of relations between "the warring sons of warring sons" fighting over inherited land in the countryside of western Ireland.
If one pairing of author and subject can, on its own, prove the unique merit of the Penguin Lives dynamic, it is Edna O'Brien writing on James Joyce. Of the great works of the twentieth century, his Ulysses stands alone as the groundbreaking, immeasurably influential masterpiece. Edna O'Brien, award-winning novelist and chronicler of Irish life in our day, approaches James Joyce as only a fellow countryman can in her beautiful, poetic rendering of his life. From his early days as the rambunctious Jesuit school student, one of ten children, through his flight to Europe and the success, love and despair he would experience there, to his final, frustrated days as "a poor old man in a long overcoat, an eyepatch and a stick, stones in his pocket to keep off marauding dogs, " O'Brien's deft, gentle, inciteful prose captures the essence of this troubled literary master.
This novel tells the story of two Irish girls, Caithleen Brady and Bridget Brennan, and their escape from a life filled with countryside and convent to the allure and the crowds, lights and noise of Dublin.
