Kev McCready is a writer, born in Liverpool but now living in Devon. Always with his nose in a book and a cuppa brewing. A fanatical reader since the age of five, Kev has a collection of bookmarks as esoteric as his bookshelves…

I met Anne Enright at a book signing in Liverpool. She’s all business, polite but friendly. There is also that impish, playful side to her, smiling wryly as she signed my book that my girlfriend at the time had already signed. Enright is a Libran, obviously.

This is another example of where the books reflect the author. Prepare for an underrated writer of both skill and economy of vision. Not a word or a phrase wasted, a skill which she told me was partly the work of her editor Robin Robertson. That is an act of selfless generosity, but does the Kubrickian warmth of her own work a disservice.
She won The Booker Prize for The Gathering (2007), having already published a number of novels and short stories. In it, a woman returns home for the funeral of her brother after he committed suicide. It’s stark and brutally honest as the narrator uncovers what caused him to take her own life and realises that knowledge only comes from maturity.

The Green Road (2015) is a study of the family as much as the above was and how much people in childhood reflect the adults they become. Rosaleen Madigan calls her children home for one last Christmas before she sells the family home. The novel is a discussion on life’s disappointments and how much dysfunctional children easily become dysfunctional adults.

The Forgotten Waltz (2011) is the nearest she’s come to a “state of the nation” novel. It’s about an affair, set against the collapse of the “Celtic Tiger” economy in Ireland. The illicit relationship and the accident that leads to its discovery is used as a metaphor for the transient, juvenile happiness that money brings. It also contains one of my favourite lines from any book, that “kissing is like birdsong, beautiful but useless at the same time.”

Her most recent novel Actress (2020) has similar themes to the Gathering, but with a fictional backdrop. A woman has chosen to ignore the past of her mother, Kathleen O’Dell. Once a Hollywood starlet and queer icon who ended her career advertising butter and getting sectioned for attempted murder. But digging deeper, she finds a family secret that is even worse. Enright’s conversational tone is still here, but she uses it to twist the knife a little deeper in the novel’s conclusion.

Finally, Yesterday’s Weather (2008) is a compilation of short stories, culled from two previous collections. It’s a great introduction to her writing. Among the highlights: Till The Girl Died; with a woman kicking over the wreckage of her husband’s affair and Here’s To Love, reminding us that no matter where we go and whom we love, our ex’s are always with us.