Edna O'Brien

Author Information
Edna O'Brien's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    33 Books (1 Series)
  • First Book:
    September 1966
  • Latest Book:
    October 2019
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Full Series List in Order

The Country Girls

1 - The Country Girls (Dec-1975)
2 - The Lonely Girls (Sep-1991)
3 - Girls in Their Married Bliss (Dec-1975)

Book List in Order: 33 titles

  • August Is a Wicked Month

    Separated from her husband, Ellen finds herself living alone in a city she dislikes - a place that denies her past and offers no hope for her future. Determined to change her life, she decides to go south in search of sun and companionship....

  • Casualties of Peace

  • A Pagan Place

    A newly reissued edition of this haunting, poetic coming-of-age novel from “one of the great writers...in the English-speaking world” (The New York Times)“O’Brien’s evocative prose shows the chilling hold that history and the dead clamp on ...

  • A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

  • Night

    "Edna O''Brien''s classic novel NIGHT takes us through one long, sleepless night with Mary Hooligan. From the center of her bed, a four poster no less,"" Mary recalls her fertile past, from her childhood in the Irish countryside to the love affairs s...

  • Zee & Co

  • The Country Girls

    The Country Girls - 1

    The story of Cait and Baba and their escape from countryside and convent to the alluring "crowds and lights and noise" of Dublin. The author also wrote "Johnny I Hardly Knew You", "The Love Object and Other Stories" and "A Scandalous Woman and Other ...

  • Girl with Green Eyes

    The comic sequel to "The Country Girls", in which Caithleen Brady finds romance in Dublin - classy romance with the second Mr Gentleman. The story of Caithleen and Baba continues in "Girls in Their Married Bliss"....

  • Girls in Their Married Bliss

    The Country Girls - 3

    Kate and Baba are in London, playing out the tragicomedy of their married lives to its surprisingly level-headed conclusion. Kate, feeling trapped in her grey stone house with her increasingly cold husband, tearfully looks for her dreams of romanc...



  • The Love Object: Selected Stories

    Love and its objects are the common elements in these eight stories: the nervous love of a country mother for her sophisticated, town-living daughter, the adoration of a mistress for her married lover and less orthodox affairs between women and their...

  • I Hardly Knew You

    Edna O'Brien is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. She is considered the "doyenne" of Irish literature. Philip Roth considers her "the most gifted woman now writing in English", while former President of Ireland Ma...

  • A Rose in the Heart

    • / Contemporary Romance
    • Buy Buy

  • Some Irish Loving

    Anthologizes letters, drama, poetry, and short stories ranging from Cuchulain to an anonymous schoolgirl to Synge, Yeats, and Joyce, revealing Irish responses to love in all its forms and providing a catalog of the ways of love...

  • Returning

    A series of short stories in which the author returns to the Ireland of the 1940s, focusing on the loves, fears and ghosts of a rural childhood at a time when all convent girls were in love with Clarke Gable and lonely bachelors rode their bicycles d...

  • Fanatic Heart

    “O’Brien tells the Irish woman’s inside story. She has -- as only the finest writers can -- created a world; she speaks in a voice identifiably and only hers.” -- Mary Gordon, The New York Times Book ReviewIn these selections from twenty yea...

  • A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna

    In these selections from twenty years of her best short fiction, Edna O'Brien pulls the reader into a woman's experience. Her stories portray a young Irish girl's view of obsessive love and its often wrenching pain, while tales of contemporary life s...

  • The High Road

    Love and tragedy converge in a seaside town in The High Road, a newly reissued novel from Edna O’Brien, the author of Girl and “one of the most celebrated writers in the English language” (NPR’s Weekend Edition)This richly peopled, compelling...

  • Lantern Slides

    Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction“Superb...[Lantern Slides] continues the quest for origin and explanation that has preoccupied O’Brien...Her stories unearth the primeval feelings buried just below the surface of nostalgia, u...

  • The Lonely Girls

    The Country Girls - 2

    Caithleen and Baba, first encountered in The Country Girls, are now living in Dublin, where they discuss men, drink gin, and try to look fast. Cait, in the pursuit of true love, becomes involved with the fanatically domineering Eugene Gaillard. Painf...



  • A Selection

  • Time and Tide

    A newly reissued novel from the author of Girl, “one of the most celebrated writers in the English language” (NPR’s Weekend Edition)“As her disturbing novel clearly reveals, Edna O’Brien possesses what Henry James called an imagination ford...

  • House of Splendid Isolation

    House of Splendid Isolation is a newly reissued novel from Edna O’Brien, the author of Girl -- “one of the most celebrated writers in the English language” (NPR’s Weekend Edition).The heartbreaking dilemmas and the noble and bloody history of...

  • Down by the River

    Down by the River is a newly reissued novel from Edna O’Brien, the author of Girl -- “one of the most celebrated writers in the English language” (NPR’s Weekend Edition).Set in the author’s native Ireland, a powerful and passionate novel ab...

  • Wild Decembers

    Wild Decembers is a newly reissued edition of the novel by Edna O'Brien, "one of the most celebrated writers in the English language" (NPR's Weekend Edition). Wild Decembers charts the quick and critical demise of relations between Joseph Brennan and...

  • In the Forest

    In the Forest is a newly reissued edition of the terrifying novel from "one of the greatest writers in the English-speaking world" (The New York Times), Edna O'Brien."O'Brien brings together the earthy and delicately poetic: she has the sound of Moll...

  • The Light of Evening

    In a luminous, truthful, and heartrending novel, Edna O'Brien returns to the Irish countryside to explore the complicated, incomparable bonds of mother-daughter love. An ailing Irishwoman anticipates the return of her long-estranged daughter, whom sh...

  • Bliss

    A treasure of world literature back in print, featuring a new introduction by Eimear McBride

    The country girls are Caithleen “Kate” Brady and Bridget “Baba” Brennan, and their story begins in the repressive atmosphere of a small vill...

  • Saints and Sinners

    With her inimitable gift for describing the workings of the heart and mind, Edna O'Brien introduces us to a vivid new cast of restless, searching people who-whether in the Irish countryside or London or New York-remind us of our own humanity. In "...

  • The Little Red Chairs

    A fiercely beautiful novel about one woman's struggle to reclaim a life shattered by betrayal, from one of the greatest storytellers of our time One night, in the dead of winter, a mysterious stranger arrives in the small Irish town of Cloonoila. ...



  • Paradise

    Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. An unnamed protagonist is on holiday with her new, much-married lover, in the company of the monstrously rich....

  • Girl

    Girl, Edna O’Brien’s hotly anticipated new novel, envisages the lives of the Boko Haram girls in a masterpiece of violence and tenderness. I was a girl once, but not anymore. So begins Girl, Edna O’Brien’s harrowing portrayal of the you...

  • Mother Ireland

    • / Contemporary Romance
    • Buy Buy

  • Tales for the Telling

    • / Fantasy
    • Buy Buy

    These 12 enchanting stories of ancient magic, daring deeds, dashing heroes, and mythical creatures sparkle with wit, nonsense, and naughtiness. Tales for the Telling features traditional Irish folk and fairy tales. In "Two Giants," Irish gi...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Edna O'Brien has published 33 books.

Edna O'Brien does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Girl, was published in October 2019.

The first book by Edna O'Brien, August Is a Wicked Month, was published in September 1966.

Yes. Edna O'Brien has 1 series.
Author Series
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