The Forgotten Waltz

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Shortlisted for The Orange Prize for Fiction

If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened.
She saw me kissing her father.
She saw her father kissing me.
The fact that a child got mixed up in it all made us feel that it mattered, that there was no going back.

© Anne Enright 2011 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Critics Review

An achingly brilliant piece of writing on passion and delusion. Comparisons to Madame Bovary are not overblown, not because it is a wry, clever, philosophical take on adultery - although it is - but because it makes you re-evaluate everything a novel can be... This book is enough to restore your faith in the power of fiction
Independent
An important novel... It is a rare thing: the literary page turner... An acutely tender depiction of the complex familial bonds joining us, a delicate portrait of love, loss and hope, from a formidably talented writer
Financial Times
A love story for our times... In a single sentence [Enright] conjures up that violent pendulum swing of emotion that can blow whole worlds apart... This is the great pleasure of reading Enright: her sheer virtuoso control of language, those compact sentences, with their occasional flares of lyrical beauty and emotional force
Irish Times
A luminous novel... Haunting, dreamy, sexy and with flashes of salty wit this is one of those novels that you are sorry to see end. It is very much an Irish novel and much of its time but the anatomy of desire and passion are timeless
Daily Express
The real pleasure of the book is the dancing, delicious prose
Evening Standard
Enright holds you in a story-telling spell. Mesmerising
Red
Absolute genius
BBC Radio 4
A brave and unusual variation on a familiar theme... She modulates so finely between comedy and pathos, between psychology and physicality, that she conveys a sense of the richness of lived experience... Anne Enright has taken a great risk in writing this book, but she has brought it off superbly
Daily Telegraph
Devastatingly good
Marie Claire
Forces us to look in the mirror... It is a discomfiting public examination of conscience, an expose of our national shortcomings so recently in the limelight
Irish Independent

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