The Country Girls Trilogy

Edna O’Brien

As dramatised on BBC Radio 4, Edna O’Brien’s iconic trilogy of novels – The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl and Girls in their Married Blissdepicts the lives and loves of two girls in rural 1950s Ireland.

Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780571330539
Date Published
07.09.2017
Delivery
All orders are sent via Royal Mail and are tracked: choose from standard or premium delivery.
Summary

ONE OF THE BBC’S ‘100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD’

Edna O’Brien’s iconic trilogy of novels – The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl and Girls in their Married Blissdepicts the lives and loves of two girls in rural 1950s Ireland.

Edna O’Brien’s debut novels revolutionised Irish literature in the 1960s. Banned by the authorities as ‘indecent and obscene’ and burned by the clergy, they were instantly notorious for their frank portrayal of sexual desire: but scandal soon became fame, and made this coming-of-age story a bestseller and instant classic.

Caithleen ‘Kate’ Brady and Bridget ‘Baba’ Brennan have grown up in the repressive atmosphere of a small Irish village after World War II. Kate is a romantic, looking for love; Baba is a reckless survivor. After being expelled from convent school, they dream of conquering the bright lights of Dublin – but are rewarded with bad faith, bad luck, and bad sex; marry for the wrong reasons, then betray for the wrong reasons; and fight – in their unique ways – the expectations forced upon young ‘girls’ of every era that dictate the women they become.

Published in an omnibus edition with a new foreword by Eimear McBride, Edna O’Brien’s portrait of innocence and youth, love and despair, hope and reality, continues to inspire new generations of readers with its bravery, lyricism, humour, and courage.

Critic Reviews

These are novels of heart-breaking empathy, rigorous honesty and peerless beauty.

Eimear McBride
EdnaO'Brien

Edna O’Brien has written more than twenty works of fiction. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O’Connor Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award For Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. In 2021, Edna O’Brien was awarded the French Ordre des Arts…

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