The Light of Evening - Softcover

ÝO'Brien¨ evokes the cruelty of estrangement while allowing her characters to remain sympathetic and giving them real voice.

O'Brien's dense patchwork of past and present in varied voices...is lush with wild yet carefully bridled language...vivid in imagery

Richly layered plotting and an impressive evocation of setting make a good foundation for O'Brien's deft, poised, and compassionate fashioning of her...character

[O'Brien] evokes the cruelty of estrangement while allowing her characters to remain sympathetic and giving them real voice.

" Fully merits the adjective ' bravura.' "

" Lush with wild yet carefully bridled language and vivid in imagery."

" [O' Brien] understands the honeycomb of family life like few writers at work today."

" Philip Roth has called Edna O' Brien the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English, and it is hard not to agree."

" A delicate, everyday, even humorous love between mother and daughter is revealed as the grandest of passions." -- Nuala O' Faolain

" O' Brien' s vivid, musical prose wafts us into the past, enveloping us in its sights and sounds and smells . . . surprising yet satisfying."

From her Dublin hospital bed, an ailing elderly woman recalls the important events, relationships, and people of her life, from her emigration to America in the 1920s, to her Irish marriage, to motherhood and her alienation from her daughter, as she awaits a visit from her estranged daughter, Eleanora. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.