Anne Enright's Blog, page 9

Claire Keegan's short story collection Walk the Blue Fields shines a light into the world of rural Ireland, says Anne Enright

Walk the Blue Fields
by Claire Keegan
163pp, Faber, £10.99

One of the most shocking moments in Amongst Women, by John McGahern, is when someone takes a carton of orange juice out of the fridge. A story that might have been set in the 50s is jerked into the 1980s and we realise what was going on outside the terrible, claustrophobic world of Moran's kitchen - not the lives of our parents, but our own.

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Graham Swift's new novel, Tomorrow, is full of quiet comedy and delicate truths, says Anne Enright

Tomorrow
by Graham Swift
248pp, Picador, £16.99

"You're asleep, my angels, I assume." Paula lies awake in the hours before dawn and silently addresses her twin children, who have recently turned 16. It is the night before they are to hear some vital family news, and Paula is full of all the things that mothers never do tell their children - important things about the lovemaking that did, or did not, make them. Not that there is anything too shameful to relate. "Your father got into bed with me one night in Brighton nearly 30 years ago and, though the place and the room and the bed have changed from time to time, he's never got out." He sleeps beside her now, not like a husband or a lover, but like a man "on the eve of his execution".

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There is a dreamy kind of truth in Wish I Was Here by Jackie Kay, says Anne Enright

Wish I Was Here
by Jackie Kay
198pp, Picador, £12.99

I once read an old Alice Munro review that said the problem with her writing was that it "wants to be liked". "Well everyone likes it now," I thought. "You old bollocks." But the comment stayed with me - it said so much about what people used to require of their writers. It also seemed to say that the desire to please was not an essential one, that weakness - especially a pleasing sort of weakness - was a distraction from the strenuous, writerly business of being alive.

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