The Country Girls Trilogy

Edna O'Brien's beloved and controversial modern classics reveal the lives and loves of two girls in rural 1950s Ireland (with a foreword by Eimear McBride).





'The taboo-breaking, the fabulous prose - there's no one like Edna O'Brien ... Beautiful.' Anne Enright

'Surprising and beautiful and courageous .. A beacon.' Megan Nolan



'Brilliant and brave.' Ann Patchett

'Glittering energy.' Colm Tóibín

ONE OF THE BBC'S '100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD'



Caithleen 'Kate' Brady and Bridget 'Baba' Brennan are growing up in a repressive Irish village after World War II. Kate is a romantic, looking for love; Baba is a reckless survivor. After being expelled from convent school, they dream of the bright lights of Dublin - and are rewarded with bad luck and bad sex; marry for the wrong reasons; but continue to fight the expectations forced upon 'girls' of every era to become brave new women.



Edna O'Brien's debut novels revolutionised Irish literature in the 1960s. Banned by the authorities as 'indecent' and burned by the clergy, they were notorious for their frank portrayal of sexual desire: but scandal turned to fame, and made this glorious coming-of-age tale an instant classic that inspires and delights readers to this day.



Edna O'Brien wrote more than twenty celebrated novels, including her classic The Country Girls Trilogy, as well as multiple plays and works of non-fiction, which have been translated into over thirty languages. Her final novel was the acclaimed Girl, which won the Kerry Group Prize for Fiction in 2020. She was the recipient of many accolades, 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. In 2018, O'Brien was appointed an honorary Dame of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2021, she was also awarded the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she lived in London for many years before her death on 27 July 2024.

Eimear McBride is the author of two novels: The Lesser Bohemians (James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, Irish Novel of the Year, the Goldsmiths Prize, and others). She was the inaugural creative fellow at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading and occasionally writes for the Guardian, TLS, New Statesman and the Irish Times.