She is the 2011 recipient of the Frank O’Connor Prize, awarded for her short story collection Saints and Sinners. Another well written Edna O'Brien novel, but not as entertaining and charming and the first two in the Country Girl series. This started out in a light hearted way - a sticky August, the beginnings of a potentially stickier liaison and then the decision to abandon London and head to Cannes where a holiday might promise the luxury of fast men, faster cars and nights of heady passion as surf crashes on beaches and the Moroccan zephyr flutters the luxuriant drapes of the master bedroom. Also she oftentimes remembers her son and whenever she does, she loses interest on the man who is raring to go to bed with her.

Ellen is bored at home in London, bored with her straight-laced sexual encounters and bored with life in general. Separated from her husband and young son, Ellen leaves behind the loneliness of London for a new life of excitement and sexual freedom:a ‘jaunt into iniquity’ on the gorgeous French Riviera.

When the book opens Ellen’s husband offers to take their young son — who divides his time between both parents — on a camping trip to Wales.

She is the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O’Connor Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award For Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. For more than 60,000 years, stories have formed, and continue to form, an integral part of the culture and traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. More of a novella, O'Brien does a tremendous job of bringing us inside the mind of a woman, Ellen, who is hurting and insecure after a divorce. Nevertheless, there is a new level of ennui and resignation, of displacement and alienation that in some ways reminded me of—and anticipates—Joan Didion's early fiction: Play It as It Lays and Book of Common Prayer. The dialogue is awful, character development is non-existent, and there is not one worthy sex scene in the book.First published in 1965 this book was initially banned in Ireland because of its sexual content but by today's standards it is pretty tame.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. But first to address what is possibly the funniest and most patronising review I've ever read on the back of a book. When Ellen’s husband takes their seven-year-old young son — whom they share custody for — on a camping trip to Wales, Ellen is free to enjoy her own summer break from her job as a theatre critic.I really didn't find much to enjoy in this novel whose main protagonist Ellen, left home alone while her son goes on holiday with his father, decides to take a holiday in France to rediscover some excitement in her life. Broke and shocked, Ellen makes her way back home only to discover that the actor she wanted so badly may have given her an STD. The language has a slow, langurious quality to it, in which everything seems to be happening in the half-realized manner of a dream, interspersed with the frenetic quality of extreme loneliness. I picked this up thinking, ooh a nice summery read, something on the 1001 books list and possible some guilt-free, liberated and escapist, pseudo-feminist sex frolics (somewhere in a middle ground that is neither the weird dirty old man kinkiness of Michel Houllebecq and isn't Jilly Cooper either) . But she clashes with one of the young American women in the star’s orbit and seems to come at everything from a different angle than everyone else.