Yesterday's Weather

First publication of a new collection of the Booker Prize-winner's stories including those from her most recent hardback 'Taking Pictures'.In Yesterday's Weather, Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright presents a series of deeply moving stories about women stirred, bothered, or fascinated by men they cannot understand, or understand too well. Enright's characters are haunted by the ghosts of the lives they might have led - lit by new flames, old flames, and flames that are guttering out. A woman's one night stand is illuminated by dreams of a young boy on a cliff road, another's is thwarted by an swarm of somnolent bees. A pregnant woman is stuck in a slow lift with a tactile American stranger, a naked mother changes a nappy in a hotel bedroom, and waits for her husband to come back from the bar. This collection includes some of Enright's best loved stories as well as her latest works. These are sharp, vivid tales of loss and yearning, of surrender to responsibilities or to unexpected delight; all share the unsettling, dislocated reality, the subversive wit and awkward tenderness that have marked Anne Enright as one of our most thrillingly gifted writers.

Enright deals beautifully with the modern world ... blood, guts, and heart-stopping beauty, At the top of her form, she is remarkable, Shockingly beautiful and painfully funny, The quality of the writing should help to explain Enright's having won the 2007 Man Booker Prize ... single lines and paragraphs are so well crafted, with such salty, pleasantly brutal sensibility, that these stories function like beguiling advertisements for Enright's novels. After sampling Taking Pictures, those who, like me, have not yet read The Gathering will likely move her Man Booker winner nearer to the top of the pile beside the bed, She's a sphinx, an alchemist, a literary witch who sticks a spell on you. Angela Carter and Ali Smith can do this too.... buy it, read it, it isn't realism, it's music

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and six novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gáis Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature.