The Gathering

Description

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

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 beautifully describes the way hurt can be inherited... Enright is a daring writer - witty, original and inventive... Utterly compelling -- Eithne Farry * Daily Mail * It is clearly the product of a remarkable intelligence, combined with a gift for observation and deduction -- A. L. Kennedy * Guardian * A welcome return, for this writer, to novel form, and as a fresh, sophisticated take on the ever-popular dysfunctional family saga -- Eve Patten * Irish Times * Anne Enright has all she needs in terms of imagination and technique and she's a tremendous phrase maker -- Adam Mars-Jones * Observer * Enright ambushes as memory does, drawing you into an event and then questioning its reality * Sunday Telegraph *