Annie Dunne

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Annie had sought refuge on the farm after being forced to leave the house of Matt, her brother-in-law, when he re-married. Annie’s memories are filled with the memories of her young days, when there was more regard for the ways of others, a sense of permanence that seems to have disappeared, and a grander way of life. She is lonely, feels the emptiness of never having married and had her own children, and she fears the position she occupies as someone who has been and can be again easily discarded. Never one to fit in socially, she’s developed a rich inner life, and it’s her interior monologue, her thoughts, both good and bad, ugly and unflinching, which make up the prose of this book. The twentieth century is encroaching on the largely rural County Wicklow, and Annie and Sarah are about to become obsolete.

He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and others.

And somehow, because Barry captures the minutiae of daily life so eloquently, the story sings in such a way you want to keep reading. Our eponymous protagonist, Annie Dunne, is a woman in her late fifties who has lately come to Wicklow to live on her cousin Sarah’s farm.

There is a runaway horse, and hints of potential sexual abuse, but much of the novel is about Annie's interior life.The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. Annie Dunne is a novel in which few external dramas occur--there is an accident with a pony and trap, one of the children goes temporarily missing--but Barry evokes superbly the inner dramas of his characters. I carry the bed heat on the surface of my skin and the soft breeze of the night shows great interest in me, raising the hairs on my arms. What this fine book lacks in page-turning plot it more than compensates for in wonderful, lyrical prose that’s best savoured slowly, lingeringly rolling each evocative phrase around your brain – no, your soul – like luxuriating in a long warm comforting bath. I suspect we are all like Annie in a way, too much inside ourselves sometimes, not in touch with anything but the surface of the others around us, hoping, somehow, that we will leave a footprint behind, but knowing we are mostly treading in dust that will be covered as soon as we are gone with other footprints, also destined to disappear.

In superb prose, which brilliantly evokes Irish speech without the annoying misspellings characteristic of attempts to portray dialects, Barry allows us into Annie's rich internal meanderings: her resentments, her fears, her worries, memories, her delight in the yeasty smell of unbaked loaves of bread, and her genuine confusion when she finds her young charges lying naked in bed with the girl commanding her brother, "Lick it. I invariably end up going back to authors who simply know how to tell a good story without being too showy. Annie lives with her cousin Sarah on a small farm where they work extremely hard doing all the things that men usually do on farms, in addition to the traditional work of women.When summer arrives, Annie’s widowed nephew brings his two children to stay for the summer so he and his new wife begin to turn their new house into a home.