It was like the rocks took the light and hid it away. “Far below were the limestone flats they called the Flaggy Shore grey rocks under a grey sky, and there were days when the sea was a glittering grey and your eyes could not tell if it was dusk or dawn, your eyes were always adjusting.

Enright’s sense of place is fabulous, her relationship with the land she writes about is easy to see.

Life takes the Madigan siblings Dan, Emmet, Constance and Hanna to various places, giving them all different challenges, home generally feels like a very long way away. Each of these narratives are almost like linked short stories – in which we travel to a new place and meet new people, each of them glancing over their shoulder to the Ireland of their childhood. I enjoyed this third person perspective, switching as it does between the five members of the Madigan family over a period of more than twenty years. Before the novel reaches this point of potential change, we meet each member of the Madigan family, dropping into their lives in New York, Africa or Dublin. When Rosaleen decides it is time to sell the family home, her adult children, each living lives very different to one another, rush back to the family home for one last Christmas. The Madigan family are presided over by Rosaleen, a widow, in a small town in West Clare. Like The Gathering, The Green Road centres on a family at a time of crisis. She had been waiting, all her life, for something that never happened and she could not bear the suspense any longer.” For me that is a big plus point – I love that Irish tradition, and The Green Road is a wonderful novel. With this novel we find ourselves in fairly familiar territory – a family drama, like those we perhaps expect of certain Irish writers. This is only the second Anne Enright novel that I have read, The Gathering Enright’s 2007 Booker winning novel is I believe something of a modern classic.

The gathering enright novel