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. ( )

People tend to get somewhat distracted by prizes, and some authors become even more self-regarding. This book has tremendous ambitions but it is not always the ambition to describe a family's loss. More often, it's the ambition to write a great novel and become famous. There is a lot of scraping of the bottom of the emotional barrel here.

There are abrupt transitions, one-sentence paragraphs, unexpected diversions, invented memories and fragmentary scenes, and they are part of the novel's purpose: Enright wants to demonstrate what happens when memories are defective. The problem is that there is another reason why writers turn to fragments and hypothetical scenes: because they are struggling to fill the page, to build the novel, to write a masterpiece of introspection. As I read, I sometimes felt the sting of real pain, real memories: but more often, I felt the persistent trouble the author had in writing great prose, in putting together a great book. Moments when other authors would drill down into difficult memories are alleviated by the sparkly kaleidoscope of Enright's writing. As proof: we never understand why the mother should be so despised; we never hear the difficult conversations with the family about Liam's past; we never see more than fragments of the narrator's noctournal life. When I read those pages describing how the narrator would stay up all night while her husband slept, I thought: Yes, that's Enright, staying up all night fretting about her Great Novel.

Enright is like Kavanagh in the rawness, the nakedness of her writing. But Kavanagh's ambition was to see himself, to understand things clearly and honestly. Here there is much naked ambition, too little naked analysis.

If the prize hasn't cocooned her in a warm swathe of self-regard, then she might well go on to something genuinely strong. But this is a weak novel, where family feelings are marred by an unpleasant desire for fame. ( )

If I am honest I found this difficult to follow, although I did enjoy the underlying story.

The subject of abuse was skirted around for most of the book and that left me feeling as if it perhaps wasn't given as much importance as perhaps it should have.

Good in parts would seem a fair assessment, but overall I was left disappointed. ( )