The Forgotten Waltz - Softcover

Enright, Anne

3.18

6,152 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224089048 ISBN 13: 9780224089043

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2011

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

"The Forgotten Waltz" is a memory of desire: a recollection of the bewildering speed of attraction, the irreparable slip into longing. In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, 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', Sean Vallely. As the city outside comes to a halt, Gina remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and the stillness and vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina waits the arrival on her doorstep of Sean's fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie - the complication, and gravity, of this second life. In this extraordinary novel, this opening book of secrets, Anne Enright speaks directly to the readers she won with the success of The Gathering. Here, again, is the sudden, momentous drama of everyday life, the volatile connections between people; that fresh eye for each flinch and gesture; the wry, accurate take on families, marriage, brittle middle age. The same verve and humour and breathtaking control are evident; the ability to merge the ordinary and the beautiful. With "The Forgotten Waltz" Enright turns her attention fully to love - you might even call it romance - as she follows another flawed and unforgettable heroine on a journey of the heart. Writing at the height of her powers, this is Anne Enright's tour de force, a novel of intelligence, passion and real distinction.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

'Enright holds you in a story-telling spell. Mesmerising' --Red Magazine

'As ever, Enright excels in her incidental detail' --Spectator

'An elegant, eloquent look at love, loss and ruination that's devastatingly good' --Marie Claire

`it's Enright's execution that wows. Her characteristically remorseless and unflinching prose is particularly well-suited to capturing the day-to-day minutiae of a destructive relationship and you'll be hard pressed to find any novel that better encapsulates the excesses of the Celtic Tiger' --Metro Herald

'[Enright's] amazing ability to engage in lyric flights while keeping her feet on the ground, her way of returing to certain intimate details and of making jumpy little jokes, her habit of using colloquial phrasing to moor Grand Statements, and her rushing, exquisitely turned perceptions' --New Statesman

5 stars: 'A luminous novel... Haunting, dreamy, sexy and with flashes of salty wit this is one of those novels that you are sorry to see end. It is very much an Irish novel and much of its time but the anatomy of desire and passion are timeless.'
--Daily Express, Jennifer Selway

'A brave and unusual variation on a familiar theme... Hers 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... Anne Enright has taken a great risk in writing this book, but she has brought it off superbly'. --Daily Telegraph, Edmund Gordon

'The real pleasure of the book is the dancing, delicious prose.' --Evening Standard, Melanie McDonagh

'That's the Anne Enright voice all right - wry, disabused, reckless, candid, funny' --Guardian, Hermione Lee

'The book...succeeds admirably, because Enright's characters are indeed so ordinary and fallible; they could quite easily be us.' --Daily Mail, Ross Gilfillan

Book Description:

A powerful, moving book of secrets, longing and loss, from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.