Speaking plainly

Novelist Anne Enright explores writing, family and injustice in this witty and compassionate collection of essays.

- HELENA WIŚNIEWSKA BROW

'It does not seem a lot to ask,” Anne Enright writes in this new book, “that a novel should give you something to think about; that it might bring you a little further on.”

It’s no surprise then that the same criteria – to offer matter to contemplate, to bring the reader a little further on – are more than met in this showcase of the author’s nonfiction writing. Attention is a startling, witty and typically precise exploration of Enright’s life and preoccupations.

It’s also a clever title. The Dublin-born author has attracted plenty of reader attention over her 30-year literary career, but largely for her fiction, the novels especially. Her most recent, The Wren, The Wren, won this year’s Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction as well the 2024 Writers’ Prize for Fiction; others include The Actress, The Green Road and the 2007 winner of the Booker Prize, The Gathering.

Many of these novels explore what it means to be Irish; all encompass issues that are essentially human. Family, relationships, memory and loss in daily, often female, life are classic Enright concerns. Her writing is erudite but down to earth, her voice unapologetic.

It’s the same bold voice and clear-cut attention that she brings to this book of essays. Enright has been busy between novels: the essays have been collated from over her career and include cultural criticism, autobiographical writing, newspaper articles, lectures and pieces from literary journals such as The New York Review of Books and London Review of Books. Each is given fresh context in this collection with a brief, often revealing, introduction.