The Country Girls Three Novels And An Epilogue

Download or read book The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue written by Edna O'Brien and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A treasure of world literature back in print, featuring a new introduction by Eimear McBride This omnibus edition includes the novels The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss. The country girls are Caithleen “Kate” Brady and Bridget “Baba” Brennan, and their story begins in the repressive atmosphere of a small village in the west of Ireland in the years following World War II. Kate is a romantic, looking for love; Baba is a survivor. Setting out to conquer the bright lights of Dublin, they are rewarded with comical miscommunications, furtive liaisons, bad faith, bad luck, bad sex, and compromise; marrying for the wrong reasons, betraying for the wrong reasons, fighting in their separate ways against the overwhelming wave of expectations forced upon "girls" of every era. The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue charts unflinchingly the pattern of women’s lives, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair, in remarkable prose swinging from blunt and brutal to whimsical and lyrical. It is a saga both painful and hilarious, and remains one of the major accomplishments of Edna O’Brien’s extraordinary career.

Download or read book Country Girl written by Edna O'Brien and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."-National Public Radio When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation. Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime.

Download or read book The Country Girls written by Edna O'Brien and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic title in Edna O'Brien's Country Girls Trilogy - the first volume It is the early 1960s in a country village in Ireland. Caithleen Brady and her attractive friend Baba are on the verge of womanhood and dreaming of spreading their wings in a wider world; of discovering love and luxury and liquor and above all, fun. With bawdy innocence, shrewd for all their inexperience, the girls romp their way through convent school to the bright lights of Dublin - where Caithleen finds that suave, idealised lovers rarely survive the real world. 'She is one of our bravest and best novelists' Irish Times 'O'Brien rises like a lark in the clear air, she sings as she flies' Literary Review 'One of the greatest writers in the English-speaking world' New York Times Book Review

Download or read book The Light of Evening written by Edna O'Brien and published by Picador. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Light of Evening is a newly reissued edition of the novel by award-winning author Edna O'Brien. In Edna O'Brien's twentieth work of fiction, an elderly widow on her deathbed in rural Ireland tells the story of her life—a story of love, family, estrangement, and motherhood. "O'Brien brings together the earthy and delicately poetic: she has the sound of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf." —Newsweek

Download or read book Girls in their Married Bliss written by Edna O'Brien and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic title in Edna O'Brien's Country Girls Trilogy - the third volume Kate and Baba are in London, playing out the tragicomedy of their married lives to its surprisingly level-headed conclusion. Kate, feeling trapped in her grey stone house with her increasingly cold husband, tearfully looks for her dreams of romance elsewhere. And when Eugene takes terrible, implacable revenge, she naturally turns to her brazen friend Baba for help. But Baba, the bored trophy wife of builder Frank, vulgarly flashing his wealth and ignorance to the world, has her own problems without Kate drooping self-pityingly over her. And both women find unsuspected qualities in themselves as they learn to face reality.

Download or read book Wild Decembers written by Edna O'Brien and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A gripping love story which will keep the reader guessing to the end and delight Edna O'Brien's many fans' Literary Review When a young man arrives from Australia to claim his inheritance, he changes a small Irish town for ever. Joseph Brennan sees Michael Bugler, the returned exile, as a threat. And for Breege, Joseph's younger sister, Bugler is an irresistible stranger to whose charms she must not succumb for fear of betraying her brother. A love-hate story on many levels, Wild Decembers explores the depth and darkness at the root of all ownership. With a rich and comic cast of characters, this primal story is a complex and daring work, fixed in a time and place, yet imbued with the permanence of myth. 'The power of the writing and the dazzle of the images make the book a resounding success' Dublin Evening News 'Intense and poetic' Independent 'She is one of our bravest and best novelists' Irish Times 'She's an exceptionally good writer. Those elegant, tumbling words, and the conviction that the writer is making a really important point' Sunday Tribune

Download or read book Time and Tide written by Edna O'Brien and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A newly reissued novel from the author of Girl, “one of the most celebrated writers in the English language” (NPR’s Weekend Edition) “As her disturbing novel clearly reveals, Edna O’Brien possesses what Henry James called an imagination for disaster...[Time and Tide] is an anthology of heightened moments...never less than brilliantly expressed.” —Joel Conarroe, The New York Times Book Review Time and Tide is a fragmented novel detailing the loves and catastrophes—and catastrophic loves—of Nell, an Irish woman trying to make a life for herself in the literary world of London. "A whimsical beauty who has swapped the suffocating narrowness of her native land for the loveless brutality of England" (The Independent), Nell is in flight from bitter, controlling, and small-minded parents, yet risks becoming just such a mother to her own sons. She seeks comfort and acceptance, yet finds death, drugs, and "an orgy of humiliation" (The New York Times Book Review). She seeks companionship, yet finds one after another predatory man: sadists, alcoholics, unscrupulous doctors, and even child molesters. Can Nell extract from the "the vast inhospitality of a creaking world" some measure of beauty and grace? The answer, of course, is yes—but at the price of many illusions.