Country Girl

The iconic memoir from the beloved Irish author of the legendary The Country Girls trilogy.



'Get ready to applaud, ladies and gentlemen, because there is no one like her.' Anne Enright



'One of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature.' Eimear McBride



'Glittering energy.' Colm Tóibín

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 ...



Born in Ireland in 1930 and driven into exile after publication of her controversial first novel, The Country Girls, was burned in public, Edna O'Brien is now hailed as one of the most majestic writers of her era - and Country Girl is her fabulous memoir.



Born in rural Ireland, O'Brien weaves the tale of her life 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.

Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have forged a legendary author. O'Brien recasts her life with the imaginative alchemy of a poet, and the result is a memoir of sparkling wisdom and honesty.



Edna O'Brien wrote more than twenty celebrated works of fiction, including her classic The Country Girls Trilogy, as well as plays and four works of non-fiction, which have been translated internationally into over 30 territories. Her final novel was the acclaimed Girl, which was awarded the Kerry Group Prize for Fiction in 2020. She was the recipient of many awards, 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, as well as being appointed an honorary Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 2018. In 2021, O'Brien 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 27th July 2024.