Dublin writer Anne Enright's grimly pointed examination of an entangled and haunted family won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Established in 1969, the Man Booker is a prestigious award given each year to the best full-length novel written in English by a citizen of either the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. In winning the Booker, Ms. Enright joins the ranks of prior notables such as Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea), Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), Ian McEwan (Amsterdam), Yann Martel (Life of Pi), and Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss).I found this novel to be a difficult yet ultimately rewarding reading experience. Ms. Enright populates her novel with a grittily human and frequently unlikable cast of characters. The narrator, thrity-nine-year-old housewife Veronica Hegarty, is gathering with her nine remaining siblings and their mother for the funeral of her brother Liam, who has taken his own life by walking into the sea, his pockets weighted with stones. Veronica and Liam were close, with only eleven months between their births. As Veronica tells us early on, "We came out of her (their mother) on each other's tails; one after the other, as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an infidelity. Sometimes I think we overlapped in there, he just left early, to wait outside."
Veronica and Liam shared a secret. For Liam, the truth of this secret may have been all too real; for Veronica, it has existed throughout her life as a question mark, and it is only and finally at the conclusion of Liam's too short and painfully endured life that Veronica begins to unearth "the seeds of my brother's death."
