Edna O'Brien's beloved classics reveal the lives and loves of two girls in rural 1950s Ireland (with a foreword by Eimear McBride).
ONE OF THE BBC'S '100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD'
'The Country Girls is not the novel that broke the mould, it is the one that made it... O'Brien gave voice to the experiences of a previously muzzled generation of Irish women. Into bodies raised to the expectation of violence, rape, forced pregnancy, innumerable dangerous childbirths, domestic bondage and the ever-present risk of institutionalisation for bringing social shame on male relations, she breathed the radical oxygen of choice, desire and sensual delight. These are. novels of heart-breaking empathy, rigorous honesty and peerless beauty.' - Eimear McBride
This omnibus edition includes the novels The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss.
The country girls are Caithleen “Kate” Brady and Bridget “Baba” Brennan, and their story begins in the repressive atmosphere of a small village in the west of Ireland in the years following World War II. Kate is a romantic, looking for love; Baba is a survivor. Setting out to conquer the bright lights of Dublin, they are rewarded with comical miscommunications, furtive liaisons, bad faith, bad luck, bad sex, and compromise; marrying for the wrong reasons, betraying for the wrong reasons, fighting in their separate ways against the overwhelming wave of expectations forced upon "girls" of every era.
The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue charts unflinchingly the pattern of women’s lives, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair, in remarkable prose swinging from blunt and brutal to whimsical and lyrical. It is a saga both painful and hilarious, and remains one of the major accomplishments of Edna O’Brien’s extraordinary career.
'The taboo-breaking, the fabulous prose - there's no one like Edna O'Brien ... Beautiful.' - Anne Enright
'Buoyantly youthful ... With all the freshness in the world.' Sunday Times
'An excellent and highly unusual blend of bawdiness and innocence.' Evening Standard
'Brilliant and brave.' Ann Patchett
'O'Brien simply offers her characters and they come to us living.' V.S. Naipaul
'A natural writer ... [such] unphoney charm and unlaborious originality.' Kingsley Amis
'One of the greatest Irish writers, of this or any era.' Sunday Independent
'One of our bravest and best novelists' Irish Times
'A literary great.' Times
'O'Brien rises like a lark in the clear air, she sings as she flies' (Literary Review)
'An impressive book: sinewy, spare, clotted with emotion and written in a well-balanced mixture of clipped, elliptical dialogue and rich description . . . Violence, hatred and conflict power the story along with great urgency, which makes this a book best read at a single sitting' (Mail on Sunday)
'A fine study of primitive passions, of marginal lives frozen in time . . . Edna remains the undisputed literary mistress of her territory. She has a perfect pitch for rural dialogue - the emotional inarticulacy, the spiteful humnour' (Sunday Express)
'You'll turn the pages of this book with the greatest reluctance, and that is because each page is so seductive, so dazzling, you won't want to leave it. Whether the setting is Brooklyn or London or the County Clare itself, richness in detail and atmosphere draws you in. And what novelist in the world can match Edna O'Brien when she explores the human heart? None, I say' (Frank McCourt)
'Ireland's greatest female writer . . . moving, dark and engrossing' (Tatler)
