Taking Pictures

The stories in Taking Pictures are snapshots of the body in trouble: in denial, in extremis, in love. Mapping the messy connections between people - and their failures to connect - the characters are captured in the grainy texture of real life: freshly palpable, sensuous and deeply flawed.

From Dublin to Venice, from an American college dorm to a holiday caravan in France, these are stories about women stirred, bothered, or fascinated by men they cannot understand, or understand too well. Enright's women are haunted by children, and by the ghosts of the lives they might have led - lit by new flames, old flames, and flames that are guttering out.A woman's one night stand is illuminated by dreams of a young boy on a cliff road, another's is thwarted by an swarm of somnolent bees. A pregnant woman is stuck in a slow lift with a tactile American stranger, a naked mother changes a nappy in a hotel bedroom, and waits for her husband to come back from the bar. These are sharp, vivid stories of loss and yearning, of surrender to responsibilities or to unexpected delight; all share the unsettling, dislocated reality, the subversive wit and awkward tenderness that have marked Anne Enright as one of our most thrillingly gifted writers.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published one previous collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and four novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and winner of the Encore Award, The Pleasures of Eliza Lynch and The Gathering - winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize. A story in this collection, Honey, won the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award.

Taking Pictures
Random House Australia
Author: Anne Enright
ISBN: 9780224085335
RRP: $32.95


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