Anne ENRIGHT ... The Gathering (Jonathan Cape, Grove/Atlantic, 2007)

THE NEW Man Booker Prize winner?

Could this be the year Anne Enright wins the Man Booker Prize for her novel, The Gathering (Jonathan Cape, Grove/Atlantic, 2007)? One of contemporary Ireland’s most distinctive literary voices, Enright, in her fourth novel, paints a melancholic portrait of a large Irish brood in Dublin as they confront the ghosts of times past: family secrets, betrayal and its redemption, love and its disappointments. By inhabiting her various characters, she blends the past and the present seamlessly to narrate a story rich in love, grief and death. American novelist Don DeLillo praised The Gathering as the finest of her four novels so far. I think so, too.

Her second collection of stories, Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape, 2008), should be out sometime in the first quarter of 2008.

The winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced in London on Tuesday, October 16, 2007