I did not like this book and was tempted not to finish it. It was boring and tedious. Other reviewers have expressed my exact sentiments so I will not attempt to improve on them. ( )

Enright pushes the 'unreliable narrator' to the breaking point in this somewhat harrowing read. Feels almost hallucinatory, with a welter of images, memories, false memories, flat out fictions, and dark thoughts coming at you. Not to mention the most horrible interior descriptions of even fairly loving relationships, everything just coated in putrid slime. Brrr. ( )

Good writing, but not my cup of tea. ( )

It took a while for me to get into this, the language is full of Irish terms .. and the main character is cold and very difficult to understand. ( )

I don't regard the Man Booker prize as a reliable indicator of books that I might like, and I have no idea what criteria are used by the M B prize judges. However I can see that this is the kind of book that might appeal to the judges of a literature prize. In many ways it's a collection of images and feelings-in-context rather than a straight forward story. A number of LT reviewers apparently don't like this style!...but I do - that's what my life is like. I seem to recall that the book was recommended to me by an artist known as "Fifi LaStupenda" who has a brilliant blog (http://fifilastupenda.blogspot.com/), which is also a series of images and thoughts, rather than a simple narrative. I liked the basic concept of the book: the death of a woman's brother causes her to reflect on her current life and the life she shared with her brother. I guess she is initially trying to answer the question: why did he suicide? But then she goes on to question the value of her own life and try to understand herself in her present context. I liked this book & I'll be interested to compare it with another of her books ("Taking Pictures") sitting in my "to read" pile. ( )