'Edna O'Brien writes the most beautiful, aching stories of any writer, anywhere.' Alice Munro 'The taboo-breaking, the fabulous prose - there's no one like Edna.' Anne Enright 'Surprising and beautiful and courageous .. A beacon.' Megan Nolan 'Brilliant and brave.' Ann Patchett 'Glittering energy.' Colm Toibin
A woman walks the streets of Manhattan and contemplates with exquisite longing the precarious affair she has embarked on, amidst the grandeur and cacophony of the cityscape; a young Irish girl and her mother are thrilled to be invited to visit the glamorous Coughlan's but find - for all the promise of their green…
SET IN DUBLIN'S LIBERTIES, Estelle Birdy's explosively original debut Ravelling channels the energies and agonies of young men let loose in the city, their city, navigating the tumultuous trajectory of youth and young manhood, where they balance their hopes with the harsh realities of their present.
Hurtling between friendships, feuds, drug-deals, family and brushes with the law, this is modern Dublin as never before portrayed. Ravelling follows Deano, a weed-smoking hurling star, living with his aunt in an about-to-be-demolished flat; Hamza, a Pakistani Muslim atheist and precocious academic, who sells his ADHD drugs to the kids in a private school;…
Letters to Judeis my most experimental novel to date and the book that has most meaning for me. It plays with language, form, and style.
Ostensibly, it is about an ailing middle-aged librarian Leo Lambkin who after his mother’s premature and sudden death receives a letter of condolence from an old flame, Bernarda Rodríguez. A correspondence follows between them as she reveals he is the father of her child begot by violent circumstances years previously in the chief librarian’s house. Overwrought by what happened, Bernarda disappeared from Leo’s life and returned to Spain. Leo disguises Bernarda as a gender-neutral Jude so his childless wife Lil will not cotton on to what is happening. The experimental nature of this novel involves streams of consciousness, telepathy, and philosophical and mythological insights.
