Edna O'Brien is the author of The Country Girls trilogy, The Light of Evening, The Love Object, and many other acclaimed books. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, O'Brien has lived in London for many years.
PRAISE FOR SAINTS AND SINNERS: "Edna O'Brien writes the most
beautiful, aching stories of any writer, anywhere."--Alice
Munro
"Ever since the publication of The Country Girls, in 1960,
O'Brien's work has been recognized as something new, turning themes
of sexual repression into joyful experiment and the age-old sadness
of exile into an opportunity to explore a brave new
world....Subversion is what catapulted Edna O'Brien to literary
stardom an incredible half century ago and, at the top of her game,
she can still cut the ground from under your feet."--Aisling
Foster, The Times (London)
"Fifty years after leaving County Clare for London, the doyenne of
Irish fiction, Edna O'Brien, is still preoccupied with the land of
her birth....[Saints and Sinners] is a shimmering book--lyric, but
highly controlled."--Rachel Cooke, The Observer (London)
"Half a century after her incendiary debut novel...Edna O'Brien
still holds her place as a revealer of the nation's soul. She shows
its 'maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious'
character, in this latest elegant, uncluttered collection, to have
a remarkable, tragic forbearance for suffering...In a lovely
flourish, O'Brien scatters her stories with small,
beautifully-tended and thrillingly described gardens, as lush as
they are sweet-smelling. Some sit on the fringes of the story,
others offer respite for characters who stumble across them in
passing, but they emerge time and again like little plots of
makeshift Edens for the fallen."--Arifa Akbar, Independent
(London)
"O'Brien mixes her trademark lyricism with a brutal depiction of
lives marred by violence...Throughout, tragedy mingles with beauty,
yearning with survival, and destruction with moments of
grace."--Publishers Weekly
"O'Brien's new collection of stories, Saints and Sinners, features
plenty of sex, plenty of people who are all very much alive, living
bravely in the face of death. Her protagonists are wonderfully
flawed and vulnerable....complexity and ambivalence gives her work
great depth and charge...So who are the eponymous saints? Who are
the new Adam and Eve? O'Brien's compassionate, mesmerizing tales
exhilaratingly refuse to spell that out."--Michele Roberts,
Financial Times
"One great virtue of Edna O'Brien's writing is the sensation it
gives of a world made new by language. . . . A lyric language which
is all the more trustworthy because it issues from a sensibility
that has known the costs as well as the rewards of being
alive."--Seamus Heaney, from "Citation, Lifetime Achievement
Award"
"The world, if viewed in clichéd terms, is indeed populated by the
two types of individuals cited in the title of this new collection
of short stories by the doyenne of contemporary Irish literature,
an acknowledged master of the form. But that is all that is clichéd
about this splendid book....Eleven stories in total bring literary
lovers' rapt attention to this author's clear, immaculate style and
her brilliant selection of detail, nimble plot construction, and
astute character delineation. Recommend O'Brien along with William
Trevor and Alice Munro."--Brad Hooper, Booklist
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