Country Girl

A Memoir

By Edna O'Brien (Hardcover Book, 2013)

In 1960, Edna O'Brien published The Country Girls, her first novel, which so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien, married with two sons, 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. It is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that imprint upon and enliven one lifetime.

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 an acclaimed writer hosted by Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Brilliant and sensuous, Country Girl is a book we are fortunate that Edna O'Brien decided to write.

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- Format: Hardcover Book
- Price: $27.99 US/$29.99 CAN
- ISBN-13: 9780316122702
- On Sale Date: 04/30/2013
- Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
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Formats Available: Hardcover Book, Electronic Book, Audiobook
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Edna O'Brien, author of The Country Girls Trilogy, A Fanatic Heart, The Light of Evening, Saints and Sinners, and many other books, is the recipient of the James Joyce Ulysses Medal and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London.

COUNTRY GIRL by Edna O'Brien

"Edna O'Brien has made of her memories something of both precision and depth, a book that, letting us see her as she was, jumps with an all-consuming curiosity from one lucidly narrated event to another, the scenes of disenchantment and bewilderment mingling with an assortment of surprises, traps, and ventures that are often, but not always, disastrous shocks. She is an observer of tears, including her own, and is able to differentiate what she calls the good tears from the bad. Only Colette is her equal as a student of the ardors of an independent woman who is also on her own as a writer." (Philip Roth).
PRAISE FOR SAINTS AND SINNERS (2011)
"In prose as rich as loam, O'Brien discerns the varied drives that coexist amid the welter of human behavior. The world she summons in Saints and Sinners is a piercingly beautiful combination of yearning and disappointment, violence, and endurance." (Benjamin Schwarz, "Five Best Books of the Year," The Atlantic).
"Sublime....to read O'Brien is not only to succumb to her sibyl's vision of other people's fates....Any new book by O'Brien is a recurrent wonder shimmering with her matchless prose." (Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review).
"[O'Brien] is a brilliantly gifted and accomplished writer, and a sympathetic but unflinching observer of the human condition." (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post).
"Edna O'Brien's Frank O'Connor award-winning collection engages lustily with the scars and tangles of love, family and politics. Knotted with wisdom and the painful lessons taught by life, the book's greatest pleasure is its mixing of the elegiac with the sharp and salty." (Chris Power, "2011's Best Short Stories," The Guardian).
"We are all both saints and sinners, just as we are all, in our own way, exiles a long way from home. And O'Brien never lets us forget it." (The Miami Herald).
"One great virtue of Edna O'Brien's writing is the sensation it gives of a world made new by language." (Seamus Heaney, from "Citation, Lifetime Achievement Award").
"Edna O'Brien has, for a half-century, been the advance scout for the Irish imagination. There is no living Irish writer who compares in terms of style, stamina, depth, or meaning." (Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin).
"Edna O'Brien writes the most beautiful, aching stories of any writer, anywhere." (Alice Munro).