The Light of Evening - Hardcover

O'Brien, Edna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618718672 ISBN 13: 9780618718672

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006

Synopsis

From her Dublin hospital bed, an ailing elderly woman recalls the important events, relationships, and people of her life, from her emigration to America in the 1920s, to her Irish marriage, to motherhood and her alienation from her daughter, as she awaits a visit from her estranged daughter, Eleanora.

About this title

Review:

O'Brien's eloquent, luminous prose is used to rich effect in this story of a mother and daughter, and the turbulent passions that they provoke in one another. (Eithne Farry DAILY MAIL)

flashes of wry humour abound..... O'Brien's anguish over the bonds between mothers and daughters is heartfelt, but the power of her book comes from the comparison between the existence of the woman who returned to the limitations of her early years and the life of one who escaped. Neither found happiness, which is why the tale is moving. (Sarah Curtis TLS)

a courageous as well as an artful book. It is also a poignant one. (Joseph O'Connor IRISH TIMES)

a stunning writer whose career has yet to be properly appreciated. (Lesley McDowell THE SUNDAY HERALD)

O'Brien's writing is as liltingly lyrical as ever. It is easy to get lost in the sheer lushness of her descriptions of life as a young Irish immigrant in America. (Diane Maclean THE SCOTSMAN)

Devotees of O'Brien's novels will welcome her return to something like her old sensuous, sensitive poetic form. (David Robson THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

it became apparent what was actually remarkable about her writing, what had been remarkable all along: it was not sex, at all: but honesty. (Anne Enright THE GUARDIAN)

Written in elegant lyrical sentences that are, at times, nearer to poetry than prose, this is, in the evening of her own career, perhaps O'Brien's finest work. (Simon Humphreys THE MAIL ON SUNDAY)

This book is a triumph of lyricism and honesty, of a brave and painful confrontation of loss and attachment, written with the unmatched textual sensibility of O'Brien at her finest. (Mary Kenny THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT)

Book Description:

Edna O'Brien returns to the world of her debut novel, The Country Girls, in an inspired account of a dying mother and her daughter

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0618718672
• ISBN 13: 9780618718672
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 294