Book details

Molly Fox's Birthday

A Novel

Author: Deirdre Madden

Molly Fox's Birthday

Molly Fox's Birthday

$19.00

About This Book

A Picador trade paperback original: a mischievous, lyrically written novel about discovering the little fictions and compounded mysteries that lie between ourselves and the people we love. MOLLY FOX'S BIRTHDAY was on the shortlist for the Orange Prize.

Page Count
240
On Sale
04/27/2010

Book Details

A Finalist for the Orange Prize


It is the height of summer, and celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house in Dublin to a friend while she is away performing in New York. Alone among all of Molly's possessions, struggling to finish her latest play, she looks back on the many years and many phases of her friendship with Molly and their college friend Andrew, and comes to wonder whether they really knew each other at all. She revisits the intense closeness of their early days, the transformations they each made in the name of success and security, the lies they told each other, and betrayals they never acknowledged. Set over a single midsummer's day, Molly Fox's Birthday is a mischievous, insightful novel about a turning point--a moment when past and future suddenly appear in a new light.

Imprint Publisher

Picador

ISBN

9780312429546

Reading Guide

In The News

“Deirdre Madden's prose is crystalline, understated, apparently effortless yet artfully suitable. She really does not remind me of anybody I've read before. And yet, like other formidable writers--Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Bowen come to mind--she is after something intrinsic and riddling but essential in us all, something that probably doesn't exist until we've read every word this book contains. It is ambitious work. Madden is a first-rate novelist.” —Richard Ford

“A novel of great subtlety, beauty and strength. Madden is one of our finest writers.” —Anne Enright

“It is almost impossible not to be moved.” —The Scotsman

“Equipped with an almost celestial compassion. Madden is the constant genius of Irish Letters.” —Sebastian Barry

“Written with skill, sympathy, and flair, establishes Madden further as one of the most important Irish novelists.” —Colm Toibin, Best Books of the Year, Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

“Resembles a box in which keepsakes have been carefully packed away: over the course of a day, the significant memories of three lives are taken out and examined, giving rise to a satisfying tension between the deceptive simplicity of the setup and the subtle impacts of each successive 'reveal'. . . .[an] elegant novel of contained power.” —The Guardian (UK)

“This is a novel about identity and it poses meaningful questions about the presentation of self and perhaps, the necessity of falsehood. . . . Zestful and lyrical writing.” —Penny Perrick, The Times (London)

About the Creators

Molly Fox's Birthday

Molly Fox's Birthday

$19.00