The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their charming, alcoholic, troubled brother Liam. With characteristic intelligence Anne Enright tells a family story that is remarkable not just for the beauty of its prose, but also for the unblinking attention it pays to the inner lives of its characters. Writing in the Guardian A.L. Kennedy said that: ‘The Gathering isn’t a simple thing at all – it’s a genuine attempt to stare down both love and death, to anatomise their pains and fears and peculiar pleasures.’

Eleanor Birne writes:

The Gathering – Anne Enright’s fourth novel, and her best – is aware of its heritage, of the books that have gone before it. It makes use of familiar signals and motifs. It is centred on a wake for a man who has died early: an alcoholic who was betrayed as a child, part of a large, chaotic family. So far so Irish. But there are new things too. There is nothing clichéd about the language (Enright treasures words; she polishes them, puts them on display). The narrator is someone new too; part of the new Ireland. She is Veronica, the dead Liam’s (slightly) younger sister, who lives a comfortable middle-class existence, and is trying to work out where she fits in with all this – with their combined past, and Liam’s death.

(LRB 18 October 2007)

Available in a paperback edition

Cape | hardback 261 pp. |ISBN: 9780224078733