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Edna O’Brien has given me more hours of reading pleasure than any other Irish writer. I started reading her in the nineties, and the fierce, angry novels that came out then: Down By The River, The House of Splendid Isolation. I went back and read The Country Girls, where it all began, and then I moved on to the poetry and passion of A Pagan Place and Night. Whenever I’m in a second-hand bookshop, I search among the Os – and that’s how I’ve come across August Is A Wicked Month on my first visit to Edinburgh, a hardback Jonathan Cape edition of Casualties of Peace in the San Francisco Book Company in Paris, an American edition of The High Road in Charlie Byrne’s. Her output is astonishing. I love the honesty and the bravery she brings to her work and I love the beautiful energy of her sentences. I haven’t read all the novels or stories yet; I’m trying to keep some of them in reserve for a time when they’ll be exactly what I need.
A favourite quote (one of any number): "She watched until the car was well out of sight. Then she flopped onto the grass and began to cry. She cried from the pit of her being. Why was she crying? Why am I crying, she asked aloud. It was not over them or the unsavouriness of the night. It was to do with herself. Her heart had walled up a long time ago, she had forgotten the little things, the little pleasures, the give and take that is life. She had even forgotten her own sins."
From the ending of the short story 'Sinners' in Saints and Sinners
Other favourites: Maeve Brennan and Claire Keegan
Declan Meade is publisher of The Stinging Fly
