Edna O’Brien is an Irish author, regarded as one of the most influential women writers of her generation. She has written novels, memoirs, plays, poetry, and short stories, and her work explores women’s lives, their often repressive upbringing, and their unsuccessful relationships with men, forthrightly and with candour. O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, is the first volume of the homonymous trilogy (1960-1964), which was met with a ban by the Irish censorship board for its sexually explicit content.
Edna O’Brien
Edna O’Brien
Girl
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HM Queen Camilla In Conversation With Edna O’Brien
On Writing Girl
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Edna O’Brien
On Six Decades of Emotional Intensity
Edna O’Brien
On Writing Girl
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Edna O’Brien
On Girl Suggesting Fate and Life of All Girls
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Edna O’Brien
On A Stark Voice for Stark Material
Edna O’Brien
Girl
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HM Queen Camilla In Conversation With Edna O’Brien
On Writing The Country Girls
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Edna O’Brien
On Speaking with the Voice of the Girls
Featured book by Edna O’Brien
Girl
Maryam is only a young girl when she is abducted by the Jihadis, finding herself married into Boko Haram. Inspired by the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping, her story is that of many girls, abruptly stripped of their innocence and forced to become women and mothers all too soon. Set against the backdrop of brutality and violence perpetrated by men, this novel witnesses the abuses inflicted on Maryam but also her resilience in a chaotic and unforgiving world. The reader follows Maryam through her journey to escape her captors, into the forest and to safety. And yet, even safe, Maryam will have to face the hypocrisy and stigma of a society in denial.
Read moreAuthor recommends
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
By James Joyce
Recommended by: Edna O’Brien
Publish Date: 1916
A fictionalised self-portrait of Joyce himself, the novel narrates Stephen Dedalus’s life from his childhood in Dublin through his search for identity and emancipation from family, religion, and country. A seminal work of modernist fiction, A Portrait of the Artist…
Heart Of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad
Recommended by: Edna O’Brien
Publish Date: 1899
Drawing from Conrad’s own experience in the Congo, this powerful and enigmatic novella tells the story of Charlie Marlow, captain of a river steamer setting out for the heart of the African continent in search of the mysterious Kurtz, an…
The Rings Of Saturn
By W. G. Sebald
Recommended by: Edna O’Brien
Publish Date: 1995
An account of the author’s journey on foot across coastal East Anglia, the book turns into a series of meditations on people, cultures, and nature prompted by elements of the journey itself which illustrates the transient status of humans on…
The Sea Around Us
By Rachel Carson
Recommended by: Edna O’Brien
Publish Date: 1952 Awards: 1952 National Book Award for non-fiction 1952 John Burroughs Medal
In this influential book, Rachel Carson uses accurate data collected from her years researching the formation of the oceans and how they shaped life on Earth, as well as from submarine war-fare of World War II, to tell a poetic…