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Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published one collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and three novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? - shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and winner of the Encore Award - and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was published in 2004. The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize 2007.
In 1854, the infamous Irishwoman Eliza Lynch met Francisco Solano Lopez, heir to the wealth of Paraguay, and, pregnant with his child, escaped with him from the streets of Paris and life as a prostitute to the strange cruel land of South America, where the two of them gained and abused power, waged war indiscriminately and were led by their recklessness and ruthlessness to a horrible downfall. Enright tells this remarkable true story through the voice of Eliza herself, as she travels down the river Parana to Asuncion for the first time, and that of Dr Stewart, a man charmed and repelled by Eliza's charismatic will, who looks back on the whole period of her reign, countering Eliza's often untrustworthy tales and giving a darker picture of events. The resulting novel is a story of obsession and ownership, of love triangles and squares, of deception and wilful ignorance. The characters' influence on each other, the madness of pregnancy, lust, jealousy, warfare and revenge are fleshed out in bold language and startling imagery, and the notion of history as a circular rather than linear progress runs throughout. A great achievement. (Kirkus UK)
