The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

Description

Beautiful Irishwoman Eliza Lynch became briefly, in the 1860s, the richest woman in the world. The book opens in Paris with Eliza in bed with Francisco Solano Lopez - heir to the untold wealth of Paraguay. The fruit of their congress will be extraordinary, and will send her across the Atlantic on the regal voyage to claim her glorious future in Ascuncion. With the lavish imaginative richness of Marquez and the crazed panoramic sweep of Herzog, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is a bold and brilliantly achieved novel about sex, beauty and corruption and the end of the old world.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and six novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gais Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature.

She writes like a shrewd Irish Marquez * Observer * Enright [has a] white-knuckle grip on language... A dazzling circus of words * Guardian * The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is as sensuous and polished as an ornate painting * Daily Telegraph * Wonderfully written...a fascinating episode...which never loses its momentum or its sharpness of focus * The Times * Richness, texture, irony and razzle-dazzle are underpinned by a probing irony and a finely tuned historical sense... The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is a star turn: what on earth will she do next? * Financial Times *