"Ten years on from her last novel, Edna O'Brien reminds us why she is thought to be one of the great Irish writers of this and any generation. When a wanted war criminal from the Balkans, masquerading as a faith healer, settles in a small west coast Irish village, the community are in thrall. One woman, Fidelma McBride, falls under his spell and in this astonishing novel, Edna O'Brien charts the consequences of that fatal attraction. The Little Red...

Edna O'Brien, the author of "The Country Girls" trilogy, "The Light of Evening," and "Byron in Love," portrays the events, people, emotions, and landscape that contributed to her rich and heady life. She is the recipient of the James Joyce Ulysses Medal, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Wild Decembers charts the quick and critical demise of relations between Joseph Brennan and Mick Bugler-"the warring sons of warring sons"-in the countryside of Western Ireland. With her inimitable gift for describing the occasions of heartbreak, O'Brien brings Joseph's live for his land to the level of his sister Breege's love for both him and his rival, Bugler. Breege sees "the wrong of years and the recent wrongs" fuel each other as Bugler comes...

The thirty-one stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without. Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are the prevalent motifs, along with the instinct toward escape and subsequent nostalgia for home. Some of the stories are linked and some carry O'Brien's distinct sense of the comical. In "A Rose in the Heart of New York," the single-mindedness...

House of Splendid Isolation is a newly reissued novel from Edna O’Brien, the author of Girl—“one of the most celebrated writers in the English language” (NPR’s Weekend Edition). The heartbreaking dilemmas and the noble and bloody history of Ireland come vividly to life in the tale of Josie, a widow living in a solitary house outside an Irish village, whose home becomes the hideout of an IRA terrorist.

Ireland, England, and other vacation locales are the setting for twelve short stories.

O'Brien's lyrical yet intense style and her genius for probing the truth of the inner life have won her acclaim throughout the world. Now, she explores the ties that bind mothers and children in this classic modern drama. "Another virtuoso performance".--People magazine.

"A Pagan Place is Edna O'Brien's true novel of Ireland. Here she returns to that uniquely wonderful, terrible, peculiar place she once called home and writes not only of a life there--of the child becoming a woman -- but of the Irish experience out of which that life arises -- perhaps more pointedly than in any of her other works. This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of druids in the woods, of unknown babies in the womb, of mischievous...