"The story of an Irish family, [The Green Road ] is the kind of book that refuses quick characterization: it is sprawling and intimate, anguished and hopeful, elliptical and intensely observed."
The New Yorker - Louisa Thomas
"This looping story of four siblings coping differently with the smothering embrace of their amusingly melodramatic mother…may be even better than its close cousin, The Gathering , which won the 2007 Booker prize. As locales shift from a stubby Irish village to AIDS-ravaged gay Manhattan and famine-torn Mali, so do the tone and point of view, over which Enright exercises perfect control."
New York Magazine - Boris Kachka
"Enright possesses an unusual combination of talents. She is a rich, lyrical prose writer, who cascades among novelties—again and again, she finds the unexpected adjective, the just noun."
The New Yorker - James Wood
The story of an Irish family, [The Green Road ] is the kind of book that refuses quick characterization: it is sprawling and intimate, anguished and hopeful, elliptical and intensely observed.”
Louisa Thomas - The New Yorker
Hugely readable…. The Green Road should confirm Enright’s status as one of our greatest living novelists.
John Sutherland - The Times (UK)
Gripping.
This looping story of four siblings coping differently with the smothering embrace of their amusingly melodramatic mother…may be even better than its close cousin, The Gathering, which won the 2007 Booker prize. As locales shift from a stubby Irish village to AIDS-ravaged gay Manhattan and famine-torn Mali, so do the tone and point of view, over which Enright exercises perfect control.
Boris Kachka - New York Magazine
A rich, capacious story, buoyed by tender humor…. The Green Road…offers a survey of Enright’s magnificent dexterity…. There’s nothing she can’t do with perspective, tone and time.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Enright…is a master of emotional excavation. …Through her wise and majestic book, [she] shows us the beauty even in life’s harsh terrain.
Karen E. Bender - O Magazine
Impressive…Enright writes with authority and confidence…Though stories end, The Green Road seems to say, the lives of the people who inhabit them go on.
David Leavitt - The New York Times Book Review
With language so vibrant it practically has a pulse, Enright makes an exquisitely drawn case for the possibility of growth, love and transformation at any age.
Enright possesses an unusual combination of talents. She is a rich, lyrical prose writer, who cascades among novelties—again and again, she finds the unexpected adjective, the just noun.
James Wood - The New Yorker
Enright, newly crowned as the first Irish Fiction Laureate, has her own distinctive voice. She is witty, sharp, profound, perceptive and often very funny as she slyly undercuts her characters’ self-deceptions.
Sue Gaisford - Financial Times
A book of brawny prose sheathed in cool intelligence.
…an impressive novel that bounces its readers through some fairly rocky terrain, not the least of it the green road of the title, as [Enright] charts the fortunes and misfortunes (mostly the latter) of the Madigan family over a period of roughly a quarter of a century…Enright writes with authority and confidence not just about her native Ireland…but about the AIDS-stricken New York in which Dan is making his way and the poverty-stricken Mali where Emmet, the novel's unsparing voice of conscience, is going about the practical business of saving lives…The Green Road is, in the best sense of the word, a strange novel. Or perhaps I should say it's a novel that gets stranger and stranger as it goes along.
The New York Times Book Review - David Leavitt
★ 03/02/2015
"Enright, newly crowned as the first Irish Fiction Laureate, has her own distinctive voice. She is witty, sharp, profound, perceptive and often very funny as she slyly undercuts her characters’ self-deceptions."
Financial Times - Sue Gaisford
"A rich, capacious story, buoyed by tender humor…. The Green Road …offers a survey of Enright’s magnificent dexterity…. There’s nothing she can’t do with perspective, tone and time."
"Hugely readable…. The Green Road should confirm Enright’s status as one of our greatest living novelists."
The Times (UK) - John Sutherland
04/01/2015
Listeners follow the Madigan family as they cope with questions of self-identity, intimacy, and the matriarch's aging. Alana Kerr uses a light Irish accent to narrate the chapters about the widowed mother and her daughters, one a natural caregiver and the other who is battling personal demons. Soft-spoken Lloyd James and the gruffer Gerard Doyle narrate the sections about the brothers, one coming to terms with his sexuality and the other an aid worker in Africa. Sadly, this rocky novel is not helped by the audiobook production. In particular, the choice of three performers with disconcertedly mismatched accents for five characters from a single family is odd. Listeners would have been better served by a solo narrator or a male-female duo with similar accents. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
★ 2015-02-17
