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For thirty years Anne Enright 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 Anne Enright’s career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen-eyed memoir to urgent political writing.
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he finds himself on a liner, eventually ending up in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, & enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – & of course no sign of the heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, & the troubles that come with each of them.
Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died at home nine days after a cancer diagnosis and having previously been in the good health. The speed of his illness outstripped that of the NHS and social care, so the majority of nursing fell to Sarah and her husband. They witnessed what happens to the body and spirit, hour by hour, as it approaches death. ‘Death of an Ordinary Man’ is an unstinting account of death by cancer, a reportage into the daily experience of caring, an exploration of the structural conditions of dying in the UK, and most importantly a testament to David’s life, that of an ordinary man. Unflinching and profoundly moving, Sarah Perry confronts the taboo surrounding death and shows us how to confront all of the terror and beauty that comes with the end of life – and how the saddest thing she has ever seen is also the best thing she’s ever done.
There wasn’t an album they wouldn’t buy, or a drug they wouldn’t try. Then it spiralled out of control. They were left with nothing. Nothing but the eternal quest of all men – the search for love. Opening in the late 1980s as rave culture is born and moving into the 1990s, ‘Men In Love’ reunites the Trainspotting crew for a riotous new journey. Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie leave heroin behind and seek joy, and the hope of redemption, on the dance floor. Each wants to feel alive in the closing years of Thatcher’s Britain, and they fill their days with sex and romance and trying to get ahead. Taking in Edinburgh, London, Amsterdam and Paris, the group charges towards an unexpected event – Sick Boy’s wedding day. But is falling in love the answer, or just another doomed quest?
The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. The tech disruptor. You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Floridian rocket launches of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Helen Lewis unravels a word that we all use – without really questioning what it means. Along the way, she uncovers the secret of the Beatles’ success, asks how biographers should solve the Austen Problem, and reveals why Stephen Hawking thought IQ tests were for losers (before taking one herself). And she asks if the modern idea of genius – a class of special people – is distorting our view of the world.
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.
It is summer, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him with a fragile hold on reality and a persistent hunger to connect with the mother who abandoned him as a child. His therapist, Martin, is also facing challenges, including his adopted daughter Olivia’s tenuous relationship with her biological mother – a predicament that makes Sebastian’s struggle feel uncannily close to her own. Olivia is producing a radio series on natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life, as her best friend Lucy faces a grave diagnosis and her husband, Francis, pursues his mission of rewilding the world. Over the course of the next year their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, as each of their destinies is revealed in a marvellous new light.
On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. Beholden to the expectations of home and family, his burgeoning desire – an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex – threatens to unravel his shy exterior. Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, yet underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own. As the seasons pass, and the pair form an ever-changing bond, James falls into a terrifying first love that will transform his life forever.
Once a shy young man from a town in Hungary, István is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the 21st century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely. Spare and penetrating, ‘Flesh’ asks profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.
At once heartrending and enlivening, this graphic memoir is not another ode to New York but a meditation on how easy it is to fall beautifully, ridiculously in love. On her first night in New York, Kay Sohini sits on the tarmac of JFK airport making an inventory of all she’s left behind in India. Kay realises two things: she’s finally made it to the city that made her in celluloid and prose from across the Pacific – Kerouac, Friends, Plath – and that trauma she’s endured in her relationship has left gaping holes in her memory. In New York, at last, Kay has room to begin the work of piecing herself back together through art and food. But as her personal story becomes a window onto a mystifying metropolis both inhospitable and inspiring to the many who call it home, Kay embarks on an electric exploration of how to forge the self and a life of one’s own today.
Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She’d have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn’t explain it. On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students’ party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden gets hold of their phone number, but the sisters don’t expect further contact and are surprised when he calls a few days later to invite them to another party, at the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister. Moira accepts despite Evelyn’s misgivings, and as the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives.
A place of myths, rumours and secrets, ‘The Hotel’ looms over the dark Fens, tall and grey in its Gothic splendour. Built on cursed land, a history of violent death suffuses its very foundations – yet it has a magnetism that is impossible to ignore. On entering the Hotel, different people react in different ways. To some it is familiar, to others a stranger. Many come out refreshed, longing to return. But a few are changed forever, haunted by their time there. And almost all those affected are women.
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