Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and the World

Summary

For thirty years Anne Enright—one of our greatest living novelists (Times)—has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright’s career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen-eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: She interprets Sophocles’ Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway, writes on Ireland’s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights, and offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner, and Angela Carter.

This stunning collection unites Enright’s cultural criticism, literary, and autobiographical writing for the first time. True to the themes that saturate her award-winning fiction, Attention explores the intersection between the personal and political, the subtleties of bodily autonomy, complex family dynamics, and the challenges of intimacy in crystalline, urgent prose. Here we see Enright grappling with and answering these questions in nonfiction. It is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.

“Anne Enright’s essays are a joy to read: incisive, wise, often humorous, they are explorations of the way we live in the world today. I turned down so many page corners as I read that I now cannot shut my copy of the book.”—Maggie O’Farrell