From internationally acclaimed, Man Booker Prize–winning author Anne Enright comes a shattering novel set in a small town on Ireland's Atlantic coast. The Green Road is a tale of family and fracture, compassion and selfishness-a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we strive to fill them. Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she's decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold. A profoundly moving work about a family's desperate attempt to recover the relationships they've lost and forge the ones they never had, The Green Road is Enright's most mature, accomplished, and unforgettable novel to date.
"[Enright] is appreciated by critics and the general reading public alike…for her exacting yet luminous expressions of family dynamics…Enright trails the Madigans over three decades, illuminating their trials and triumphs as reflective of not only their distinctive personalities and personal interests but also Irish society moving into the modern era of contraception, economic boom and bust, and o
Booklist (starred review)
"This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan…Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life's larger abstractions…Abidingly generous and humane. A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of l
