The green, green grass of home

The Green Road. By Anne Enright. Norton; 320 pages; $26.95. Jonathan Cape; £16.99.

FIRST she wrote magical realism like Angela Carter’s, then she veered into non-fiction. But it was only when she focused on her native Ireland, investigating “the wound of family”, first with “The Gathering”, which won the Man Booker prize in 2007, then with “The Forgotten Waltz” in 2011, that Anne Enright really found her voice. She returns to it in her new novel, “The Green Road”.

Intending to sell the family home, a widowed mother, Rosaleen Madigan, summons her children to County Clare for one final Christmas. The early part of the book ranges in time and place, from a New York beset by AIDS to rural Mali in west Africa and the flush of the Irish economic boom, allotting chapters to each family member. In the second half the Madigans gather: martyred, empathetic Constance; Dan, a gay failed priest; younger brother Emmet, hollowed out by aid work in Africa; and Hanna, an alcoholic first-time mother. Imperfect and ordinary, the siblings are overseen by their querulous mother, who feels that “every child she reared was ready...

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