Unabashed and morally generous, the Booker winner writes like a sharp, funny, fallen angel

In addition to producing eight novels over the past 30 years, Anne Enright has always written nonfiction around the edges. This has mostly taken the form of essays for the literary pages of the NYRB, the LRB and, indeed, the Guardian. Attention is a collection of 24 of the best, each with a new brief introduction by Enright herself. The work is culled mostly from the past 10 years, with the latest dated “Autumn 2025”, which suggests that she was still blowing on the ink as it went to press.

A decade ago most of these pieces would probably have been called “personal essays”, but that now seems redundant. Everything is personal with Enright, which is what makes you want to read her even on subjects that don’t initially appeal. The cocaine trade in Honduras, say, or the production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days in a sodden field in the Aran Islands. And just when you worry that things might, actually, be getting a bit too fine-grained, such as the revelation that on holiday her husband likes to study menus carefully before choosing a restaurant, while she is more likely to dive in and scream for chips, Enright lobs in a line that explodes her text. Leaving her beloved Venice after a holiday with said husband, she is struck by the thought that the next time she visits, “I do not know if the disaster will have happened or not, because one day it will happen. One of us will die; the other will remain.” And just like that we are taken to the deepest, darkest mystery not just of Enright’s marriage, but of the kind of relationship that we might long for ourselves.

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