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A Pagan Place

A Novel

Edna O'Brien

Picador

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ISBN10: 0374538794
ISBN13: 9780374538798

Trade Paperback

240 Pages

$17.00

CA$23.00

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In A Pagan Place, Edna O’Brien returns to Ireland, the uniquely wonderful, terrible, and peculiar place she once called home. After leaving to join a religious community in Belgium, a young woman remembers her childhood on the western coast of Ireland. She reflects on the rituals of rural life, the people she encountered, and the enchanting beauty of the landscape.

This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of mischievous girls and druids in the woods. As the impressions of her former home intensify, her mind turns to the shocking event that led to her departure.

Reviews

Praise for A Pagan Place

“O’Brien’s evocative prose shows the chilling hold that history and the dead clamp on the living.”—Paul Gray, TIME

“O’Brien brings together the earthy and the delicately poetic: she has the soul of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf.”—Ray Sawhill, Newsweek

"The artfully artless manner of the telling, the pared-to-the-bone prose, and the richly comic overtones generate the novel's particular illumination, and it's of a high intensity . . . To my mind A Pagan Place is Edna O'Brien's finest book"— Patricia MacManus, Saturday Review

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Edna O'Brien

Since her debut novel, The Country Girls, EDNA O'BRIEN has written more than twenty works of fiction. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, and the Frank O'Connor Prize. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she has lived in London for many years.

Guardian News and Media Ltd 2015

Read Author Biography at Britannica