The first collection of Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright's non-fiction writing about culture, literature and her own life.


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 Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras. They delve into Enright s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. She offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter.

In Enright's fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate.

In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.