From across the pond comes word that Anne Enright has won the 2007 Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering, beating out bookies’ favorite Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones and On Chesil Beach by household name Ian McEwan. The Independent’s review of The Gathering sets the scene:
brings together fragments of the past, real and imagined, all filtered through the consciousness of Anne Enright’s narrator, Veronica Hegarty.
Veronica is a middle-aged, newly middle-class Irish mother of two, with a Tudor-redbrick-Queen-Anne house, a nice Saab and an incredibly long-suffering husband. She is endowed with vast numbers of siblings, one of whom, when the novel opens, has just walked into the sea and drowned himself in Brighton.
For a second and third opinion, the Guardian offers a pair of raves from A.L. Kennedy and Adam Mars-Jones. Enright hails from Ireland and has three prior novels to her name The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. The curious can also read an excerpt from The Gathering.
How We Got Here: the longlist, the shortlist
