Edna O’Brien
All Books By Edna O’Brien
Country Girl
- By: Edna O’Brien
- Narrator: Edna O'Brien
- Length: 13 hours 32 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: April 30, 2013
- Language: English
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3.68(4279 ratings)
When Edna O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O’Briens’ local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O’Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation.
Starting with O’Brien’s birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the ’60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton.
Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime.
Girl
- By: Edna O’Brien
- Narrator: Sheila Atim
- Length: 5 hours 42 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: October 15, 2019
- Language: English
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3.68(4279 ratings)
“Narrator Sheila Atim sets a sensitive yet emphatic tone for this harrowing story of violence, loss, and survival…Listeners will be enveloped in this emotional listening experience.” — AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner
This program is read by Laurence Olivier Award-winning actress, Sheila Atim.
Girl, Edna O’Brien’s hotly anticipated new novel, envisages the lives of the Boko Haram girls in a masterpiece of violence and tenderness.
I was a girl once, but not anymore.
So begins Girl, Edna O’Brien’s harrowing portrayal of the young women abducted by Boko Haram. Set in the deep countryside of northeast Nigeria, this is a brutal story of incarceration, horror, and hunger; a hair-raising escape into the manifold terrors of the forest; and a descent into the labyrinthine bureaucracy and hostility awaiting a victim who returns home with a child blighted by enemy blood. From one of the century’s greatest living authors, Girl is an unforgettable story of one victim’s astonishing survival, and her unflinching faith in the redemption of the human heart.
Praise for Girl:
“Edna O’Brien tells this story with such compassion and understanding that the very disturbing events she relates are uplifting–and unforgettable. An utterly unique achievement.” — Ian McKellen
“By an extraordinary act of the imagination we are transported into the inner world of a girl who, after brutal abuse as a slave to Nigerian jihadis, escapes and with dogged persistence begins to rebuild her shattered life. Girl is a courageous book about a courageous spirit.” — J. M. Coetzee
... Read moreJames Joyce
- By: Edna O’Brien
- Narrator: Donada Peters
- Length: 5 hours 24 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 1999
- Language: English
One of Ireland’s best current novelists provides a thumbnail sketch of Ireland’s greatest writer. A passionate and sensuous portrait, James Joyce is a return to the land of politics, history, saints, and scholars that shaped the creator of the twentieth century’s groundbreaking novel Ulysses. O’Brien traces Joyce’s early days as a rambunctious young Jesuit student; his falling in love with a tall, red-haired Galway girl named Nora Barnacle on Bloomsday; and his exile to Trieste where he found success, love, and ultimately, despair. Joyce’s raucous life as well as his thoughtful commentary on his major writings are presented succinctly and masterfully for any Joyce lover to enjoy. O’Brien captures with simplicity the brilliance and complexity of this great master.
“It is swift, moving and brimming with the author’s enthusiasms and her well-earned affection for a difficult colleague.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
... Read moreSaints and Sinners
- By: Edna O’Brien
- Narrator: Suzanne Bertish
- Length: 5 hours 35 minutes
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media
- Publish date: May 09, 2011
- Language: English
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3.59(655 ratings)
With her inimitable gift for describing the workings of the heart and mind, Edna O’Brien introduces us to a vivid new cast of restless, searching people who – whether in the Irish countryside or London or New York – remind us of our own humanity. A librarian waits in the lobby of a posh Dublin hotel – expecting to meet a celebrated poet while reflecting on the great love who disappointed her. Irish workers dream of becoming millionaires in London, but long for their quickly changing homeland – exiles in both places. A searing anatomy of class is seen through a little girl’s eyes. In language that is always bold and vital, Edna O’Brien pays tribute to the universal forces that rule our lives.
... Read moreThe Light of Evening
- By: Edna O’Brien
- Narrator: Dearbhla Molloy
- Length: 9 hours 5 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2008
- Language: English
From her hospital bed in Dublin, the elderly Dilly awaits the visit of her daughter, Eleanora, from London. The epochs of her life pass before her; she also retraces Eleanora’s precipitate marriage to a foreigner, which alienated mother and daughter, and Dilly’s heart rending letters sent over the years in a determination to reclaim her daughter. But Eleanora’s visit does not prove to be the glad reunion Dilly prayed for. And in her hasty departure, Eleanora leaves behind a secret journal of their stormy relationship–a revelation that brings the novel to a shocking close.
... Read moreThe Little Red Chairs
- By: Edna O’Brien
- Narrator: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 9 hours 40 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: March 29, 2016
- Language: English
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3.24(6662 ratings)
One night, in the dead of winter, a mysterious stranger arrives in the small Irish town of Cloonoila. Broodingly handsome, worldly, and charismatic, Dr. Vladimir Dragan is a poet, a self-proclaimed holistic healer, and a welcome disruption to the monotony of village life. Before long, the beautiful black-haired Fidelma McBride falls under his spell and, defying the shackles of wedlock and convention, turns to him to cure her of her deepest pains.
Then, one morning, the illusion is abruptly shattered. While en route to pay tribute at Yeats’s grave, Dr. Vlad is arrested and revealed to be a notorious war criminal and mass murderer. The Cloonoila community is devastated by this revelation, and no one more than Fidelma, who is made to pay for her deviance and desire. In disgrace and utterly alone, she embarks on a journey that will bring both profound hardship and, ultimately, the prospect of redemption.
Moving from Ireland to London and then to The Hague, The Little Red Chairs is Edna O’Brien’s first novel in ten years — a vivid and unflinching exploration of humanity’s capacity for evil and artifice as well as the bravest kind of love.
The Love Object
- By: Edna O’Brien
- Narrator: Catherine McGoohan
- Length: 19 hours 58 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: May 05, 2015
- Language: English
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3.83(443 ratings)
As John Banville writes in his introduction to The Love Object, Edna O’Brien “is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time.” The thirty-one stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without.
Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are the prevalent motifs, along with the instinct toward escape and subsequent nostalgia for home. Some of the stories are linked and some carry O’Brien’s distinct sense of the comical. In “A Rose in the Heart of New York,” the single-mindedness of love dramatically derails the relationship between a girl and her mother, while in “Sister Imelda” and “The Creature” the strong ties between teacher and student and mother and son are ultimately broken. “The Love Object” recounts a passionate affair between the narrator and her older lover.
The magnificent, mid-career title story from Lantern Slides portrays a Dublin dinner party that takes on the lives and loves of all the guests. More recent stories include “Shovel Kings” — “a masterpiece of compression, distilling the pain of a lost, exiled generation” (Sunday Times) — and “Old Wounds,” which follows the revival and demise of the friendship between two elderly cousins.
In 2011, Edna O’Brien’s gifts were acknowledged with the most prestigious international award for the story, the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. The Love Object illustrates a career’s worth of shimmering, potent prose from a writer of great courage, vision, and heart.
“The most striking aspect of Edna O’Brien’s short stories, aside from the consistent mastery with which they are executed, is their diversity.”-John Banville