Yesterday's Weather: Stories

Overview

"Astonishing: moving, emotionally accurate, sly, and laugh-out-loud funny at times . . . Enright completely inhabits these characters."--Elaina Richardson, O, The Oprah Magazine

Extraordinary stories of love--romantic or familial, triumphant and tragic--from the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author whom the Los Angeles Times has called "part of a remarkable generation of Irish writers who have helped transform their country's literature." Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Anne Enright's novel The Gathering went on to become a national best seller acclaimed for its electrifying prose--"percussive one moment, liquid the next" (The Boston Globe)--and haunting emotional resonance. Now, in Yesterday's Weather, Enright presents a series of deeply moving glimpses into the lives of ordinary men and women struggling with the bonds of love, family, and community in an increasingly disconnected and transient world.

The stories in Yesterday's Weather show us a rapidly changing Ireland, a land of family and tradition, but also, increasingly, of organic radicchio, cruise-ship vacations, and casual betrayals. An artisan farmer seethes at the patronage of a former Catholic-school classmate, now a successful restaurateur; a bride cuckolds her rich husband with an old college friend--a madman who won't take his pills, disappears for weeks at a time, and plays the piano like a dream. Still more startling than loss or deception are the ways in which people respond to them: a wife eaten up by rage at her husband's infidelity must weigh the real stakes after his affair takes a tragic turn; confronted with a similar situation, a woman decides to cheat with, rather than against, her man. Sharp, tender, never predictable, their sum is a rich tapestry of people struggling to find contentment with one another--and with themselves.

Anne Enright has given us a rich collection of stories of loss and yearning, of the ordinary defeats and unexpected delights that grow out of the bonds between husbands and wives, mothers and children, and intimate strangers. Yesterday's Weather exhibits the arresting, unforgettable images and upsets, the subversive wit, and the awkward tenderness that mark Anne Enright as one of the most thrillingly gifted writers of our time.

Editorial Reviews

In this overstuffed collection from Booker Prize-winner Enright (The Gathering), the gems are overshadowed by the sheer number of stories (there are 31). Enright's talent lies in her ability to tweak an ordinary situation and create something that is at once unique and universal: two wives coming to different conclusions about their husbands' infidelities in Until the Girl Died and The Portable Virgin, an examination of elevator and pregnancy etiquette in Shaft or the permutations of sexual desire in Revenge. Other standouts such as Little Sister and Felix resonate because of their tight focus. In the former, the narrator pieces together her dead sister's life and realizes It was all just bits. I really wanted it to add up to something, but it didn't. In Felix, Enright riffs on Lolita and creates an endearing and repulsive middle-aged woman narrator who has an affair with a neighborhood boy. But too often Enright's characters--more often than not female, first-person narrators--bleed into one another until their stories become jumbled in the reader's mind, as another unhappy wife or mother laments her situation. (Sept.)
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Author Information

Bio of Anne Enright

Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for the The Gathering, Anne Enright has also received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and has been a writer fellow at Trinity College. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, The New Yorker, and The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction. She is also the author of Yesterday's Weather, What Are You Like? and The Wig My Father Wore.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated

Filesize

1.40 MB

Number of Pages

308

eBook ISBN

9781555848507