Forgotten Waltz

2012 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

The Forgotten Waltz is a memory of desire: a recollection of the bewildering speed of attraction, the irreparable slip into longing, that reads with breathtaking immediacy. In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. A woman recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for the love of her life. As the city outside comes to a halt, she remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and the stillness and vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, she awaits the arrival on her doorstep of his fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie. In The Forgotten Waltz, Enright is at the height of her powers. This is Anne Enright's tour de force, a novel of intelligence, passion, and real distinction.

"A new, unapologetic kind of adultery novel. Narrated by the proverbial other woman — Gina Moynihan, a sharp, sexy, darkly funny thirtysomething IT worker — The Forgotten Waltz charts an extramarital affair from first encounter to arranged, settled, everyday domesticity....This novel's beauty lies in Enright's spare, poetic, off-kilter prose — at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It's built of startling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another. Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who've ever lived." Elle

"A breathtaking work that will surprise you." Kirkus Reviews

"A gorgeous critique of Ireland as the Celtic Tiger draws its dying breaths... [A] masterful and deeply satisfying novel." Library Journal (Starred Review)

"This stunning novel by a Booker Prize winner . . . Offers up its brilliance by way of astonishingly effective storytelling." Booklist (Starred Review)

Anne Enright's most recent novel was the international bestseller The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.