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Summary
‘The taboo-breaking, the fabulous prose–there’s no one like Edna O’Brien.’ Anne Enright
‘Surprising and beautiful and courageous . . . A beacon.’ Megan Nolan
We want to live. Drink gin. Squeeze into the front of big cars and drive up outside big hotels. We want to go places.
Caithleen is a romantic: she dreams of finding a handsome man who will sweep her away and look after her. Her friend Baba thinks this makes her a right-looking eejit. What she wants is money and glamour. Life. As much of it as she can get.
But neither love nor excitement seem possible in their small village, or their convent school. And when they finally make it to Dublin, they find that home isn’t as easy to escape as they thought.
This is the first novel in Edna O’Brien’s trilogy which revolutionised Irish literature in the 1960s. Banned by the authorities as ‘indecent’ and burned by the clergy, they were notorious for their frank portrayal of sexual desire: but scandal turned to fame, and made this glorious coming-of-age tale an instant classic that inspires and delights readers to this day.
EdnaO'Brien
Edna O’Brien wrote more than twenty celebrated works of fiction, including her classic The Country Girls trilogy, as well as plays and four works of non-fiction, which have been translated into over thirty languages. Her final novel Girl was awarded the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year in 2020. She was the recipient of many honours, including the Irish…
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