Critical Praise

"Hauntingly eloquent . . . A rich, rolling prose reminiscent of Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood. If she keeps writing at this exciting level, the only person Enright will be compared with is herself."

——The Seattle Times

"What is Anne Enright like? Flann O'Brien, yes, Tristram Shandy, a little, or Jonathan Swift meeting Kurt Vonnegut. . . . She whispers from inside her characters' minds, describing confusion, and the half-realized state of things which pass before their eyes. . . . Writing that wants to be read out loud, encounters that hover on the edge of revelations, and an excitement that fiction was once supposed to deliver. What is a really good novel like? This, for a start."

——Aisling Foster, The Times (London)

"An eloquent writer . . . dazzlingly funny. . . . For Enright the recognizable dimensions of time, speech, and thought . . . are fluid and interchangeable, while metaphors often become the things they stand for. . . . [A] very powerful story."

——Penelope Fitzgerald, The London Review of Books

"This book is so sad that you want to laugh out loud. It deals with areas of experience and patterns of living that no one else has noticed. As Dylan Thomas said about At Swim-Two-Birds, ‘If you sister is a big loud boozy girl, then give her this book.'"

——Colm Tóibín

"A spry surrealist who challenges the world with extraordinary, lancing sentences . . . Enright captures something subterranean with a strange flick of her marvelous insight."

——James Wood, The Guardian (London)