The first couple of hundred pages of “Country Girl” are wonderful, the second 150 rather less so, but anyone who knows and loves her work, as I do, will want to read it from start to finish. Now 82 years old, the author of more than two dozen books, she has at last turned to the story of her own life in this memoir, though of course her life has been the raw material for much of the fiction - much of which is entirely extraordinary - she has written since the publication of her first novel, “The Country Girls,” in 1960. Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel Girl will be published by Faber in September 2019, available to pre-order now.Edna O’Brien, for whom the word “redoubtable” may well have been coined, has lived a long and quite remarkable life. O'Brien recasts her life with the imaginative alchemy of a poet, and the result is a memoir of sparkling wisdom and honesty. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have forged a legendary author. Read more from convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, moving on to the wild parties of 1960s bohemian in London, encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans, love and unrequited love, and glamorous trips to America as a celebrity writer. Born in rural Ireland, O'Brien weaves the tale of her life. Born in Ireland in 1930 and driven into exile after publication of her controversial first novel, The Country Girls, Edna O'Brien is now hailed as one of the most majestic writers of her era - and Country Girl is her fabulous memoir. I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019.

I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, success and failure, fame and slaughter, to have read in the newspapers that as a writer I was past my sell-by date, yet regardless, to go on writing and reading, to be lucky enough to live in these two intensities that have buttressed my whole life.

Country Girl by Edna O'Brien