NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

The story is a banal one, a brother dies, a sister has to deal with the wake assignments including all the family member susceptibilities and yes, theirs is a buried past secret. However, the very precise way of using the very tenses to introduce us to the different times shows that this is a master work. As the story progresses, a feeling of loss is shared with the reader in those changes in timeline. At last, the description of the dynamics of the family membners, given little by little, page after page, in simple turning-point moments of their lives reveals a strong, vivid emotional story.

The curses and blessings of family secrets and psyches are fiercely but lyrically discovered and told.

Enright has a wonderful flair for wrestling humour form the darkest shore of family strife, abuse and regret, imbuing her narrator with an original and vivid voice. The memories and perhaps-imagined recollections evoked as the narrator tries to understand her brother’s suicide are heightened by the author’s sharp yet sympathetic focus on several generations of an upper middle class Irish family.