The Country Girls - Edna O'Brien

It is the early 1960s in a country village in Ireland. Caithleen Brady and her attractive friend Baba are on the verge of womanhood and dreaming of spreading their wings in a wider world; of discovering love and luxury and liquor and above all, fun.

With bawdy innocence, shrewd for all their inexperience, the girls romp their way through convent school to the bright lights of Dublin - where Caithleen finds that suave, idealised lovers rarely survive the real world...

Edna O'Brien is the author of 19 books. She was the winner of the 1993 Writers Guild Prize for Fiction. Her biography of James Joyce was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in June 1999. Her recent fiction has been about Irish topics - religion, politics, property. In 2001 her documentary novel, In the Forest - about a brutal murder on the west coast - caused a furore in her native Ireland. It was the subject of a BBC Omnibus film.

She is one of our bravest and best novelists
Irish Times

O'Brien rises like a lark in the clear air, she sings as she flies
Literary Review

A gripping love story which will keep the reader guessing to the end and delight Edna O'Brien's many fans
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