Anne Enright

Harvard Book Store is delighted to welcome Booker Prize–winning novelist ANNE ENRIGHT as she discusses her newest work of fiction, The Forgotten Waltz, in conversation with award-winning local author GISH JEN.

In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, it has snowed. Gina Moynihan, girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life," Seán Vallely. As the city outside comes to a halt, Gina remembers their affair: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina awaits the arrival of Seán's fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie—the complication, and gravity, of this second life.

"[Enright's] is a style that glories in minutiae. She modulates so finely between comedy and pathos, between psychology and physicality, that she conveys a sense of the richness of lived experience, compared to which most other novelists appear to work in broad strokes. There are sentences in her work, whole passages even, that you want to mark up and learn off by heart for their warmth and humour, their sense of truth. . . . With her last three books—The Gathering, the short stories collected in Taking Pictures and now The Forgotten Waltz—Enright has established herself as one of the most grown-up of contemporary novelists, one of the few to pay attention to the messiness of ordinary lives, even at the expense of narrative shape. Her new novel is her most mature yet in this respect." —The Telegraph (UK)

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