Synopses & Reviews
Jessica Speight, a young anthropology student in 1960s London, is at the beginning of a promising academic career when an affair with her married professor turns her into a single mother. Anna is a pure gold baby with a delightful sunny nature. But as it becomes clear that Anna will not be a normal child, the book circles questions of responsibility, potential, even age, with Margaret Drabbles characteristic intelligence, sympathy, and wit.
Drabble once wrote, “Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary; it is, perpetually, a dangerous place.” Told from the point of view of the group of mothers who surround Jess, The Pure Gold Baby is a brilliant, prismatic novel that takes us into that place with satiric verve, trenchant commentary, and a movingly intimate story of the unexpected transformations at the heart of motherhood.
Review
PRAISE FOR SAINTS AND SINNERS:"Edna O'Brien writes the most beautiful, aching stories of any writer, anywhere."--Alice Munro
Review
"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"
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"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
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"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)
Review
"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)
Review
"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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"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)
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"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
Review
"Achingly wise…Lamenting and steely, gentled by compassion. Admirers of Marilynne Robinson will find themselves very much at home in this book." —
Wall Street Journal "Moving and meditative...I found a kind of somber bravery in the story of this unwavering, intelligent woman and her guileless and beautiful child. I'm so glad that Margaret Drabble, like her characters, just decided to keep on going." —Meg Wolitzer, NPR's
All Things Considered "Feelings of age, of history, and of hindsight permeate the book...The novels true preoccupation is social history, and it powerfully evokes the changes of recent decades." —
The New Yorker "The Pure Gold Baby is a closely observed group portrait of female friends, a patient insight into the joys and pains of motherhood, and an image of how society has changed and how it has not." —Harper's "It is a testament to the intensity and skill of Drabbles writing that part of this novels suspense has to do with our waiting for definitions, diagnoses, and certainties that are never offered; and that part of our satisfaction lies in our acceptance that they cannot be…These are characteristic Drabble maneuvers: to take us all the way to death and madness and then back, to life defiant and friendship itself defying time by living fully within it." —The New York Review of Books
"Insightful and wise, The Pure Gold Baby chronicles the deep challenges of parenting under any circumstances — yet it also captures the almost unbearable vulnerability of being human." —Boston Globe
"The Pure Gold Baby is as deep as it is wide: resonant, recursive and contemplative." —The Kansas City Star "The Pure Gold Baby is an unexpected gift from a great author. How do we treat the child who walks among us in a different way than most? In Margaret Drabble's hands the answer is with a depth of empathy few master." —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones "Margaret Drabble has written a compelling portrait of a mother whose care for her disabled child unfolds against a world of shifting mores. This is a panoramic survey of the way social attitudes toward difference have shifted--of what has been gained and of what has been lost. It is above all a humbling portrait of time, a stern reminder that what we know to be true today may well be untrue tomorrow. It is written with acuity, wisdom, and grace." —Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree "An intimate look at a small family and its circle, told with wit, sensitivity, and deft knowledge of the household details of its setting...[Drabble] is a masterly storyteller and a preeminent chronicler of modern life...Readers who yearn for well-crafted fiction full of thoughtful ideas and observations should welcome this heartily." —Library Journal (starred review) "[A] deeply intellectual, though never pretentious consideration of our intricate connections and obligations to others. Thoughtful and provocative, written with the authors customary intelligence and quiet passion." —Kirkus "Dame of the British Empire Drabble is in peak form in this marvelously dexterous, tartly funny, and commanding novel of moral failings and womens quandaries, brilliantly infusing penetrating social critique with stinging irony as she considers what life makes of us and what we make of life... Given Drabbles standing as one of the giants of world literature, elevated attention will be paid to her first novel since The Sea Lady (2007)." —Booklist (starred review)
Synopsis
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.
In "Send My Roots Rain," Miss Gilhooley, 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. The Irish workers of "The Shovel Kings" have pipe dreams of becoming millionaires in London, but long for their quickly changing homeland-exiles in both places. "Green Georgette" is a searing anatomy of class, through the eyes of a little girl; "Old Wounds" illuminates the importance of family and memory in old age. In language that is always bold and vital, Edna O'Brien pays tribute to the universal forces that rule our lives.
Synopsis
The first new novel in five years from "one of the most versatile and accomplished writers of her generation" (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker)
About the Author
Edna O'Brien, author of The Country Girls Trilogy, The Light of Evening, Byron in Love, and many other books is the recipient of the James Joyce Ulysses Medal and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London.