The husband is a truly impressively repulsive character. While very different in some ways, it reminded me slightly of Celia Fremlin’s The Hours Before Dawn in these passages - and that’s a compliment, for sure. Veronica’s nocturnal life, filled with bottles of 4am red wine and (occasionally concurrent) aimless drives through the darkness, is a powerful way of exploring her dislocation and increasing detachment from reality, particularly as a mother. Its momentum carries you on through what’s otherwise quite a threadbare narrative. Told entirely in Veronica’s words, her voice is at once desperate and disconsolate, and filled with wry and very dry humour. I loved the energy and personality of the writing. The remainder of the novel focuses more on the titualar "Gathering" itself, as the majority of the surviving siblings come together to process, or perhaps avoid processing, the tragedy, and make sense of the complex web of relationships that makes up the Hegarty family. It builds to mid-novel climax where the roots of Liams's (and Veronica's) trauma are revealed. The first part of the novel largely focuses on the present-day emotional state of Veronica, saddled with the burden of arranging the funeral while dealing with a failing relationship with her careerist and cheating husband, while flashing back to experiences years before, largely centred on the family's grandmother Ada and her relationships. It focuses on the funeral and wake of her closest brother, Liam, who has recently taken his own life in the sea at Brighton. The Gathering is told from the perspective of a 39-year-old Irish mother, Veronica Hegarty, who is one of a family of twelve siblings. In 2015 she was appointed the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction, and more recently was shortlisted for the Women's Prize in 2020 for her seventh novel Actress. Her writing is frequently focused on family and motherhood, and she published a collection of essay on the latter in 2004, entitled Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. The Gathering was her fourth novel, and thus far only to be shortlisted for the Booker.Īside from her fiction, she has also written frequent columns and articles for The New Yorker, running into some controversy in her Booker-winning year for an article on the McCann family. Her first publication was a collection of short stories, The Portable Virgin, with her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, following in 1995. She began her career as a TV producer and director for RTE in Dublin, before a breakdown caused her to step back and focus full time on her writing. After studying in Canada for two years, Enright did a BA in English and Philosophy at Trinity College, and subsequently the UEA's famed Creative Writing Course, where she studied under Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury. Anne Enright (1962- active 1991-), born Dublin, Ireland.
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