Edna O'Brien's first novel The Country Girls and its sequels The Lonely Girl and Girls in their Married Bliss changed the temperature of Irish literature in the 1960s. The characters of Kate Brady and her friend Baba Brennan have inspired generation after generation of readers and writers, as we see them struggling against the confines of a rural Irish convent school; revelling in the bright lights of Dublin; and weathering the unexpected challenges of married life in London. The passion, artistry, and courage of Edna O'Brien's vision in these novels - tender portraits of innocence and youth, love and passion, dreams and reality - resonate into the twenty-first century, and are illuminated by Eimear McBride's new foreword.

I love fire. Fire is the colour of genius. In this audacious new work, Edna O'Brien gives voice to the women who were central to the life of James Joyce. 'James Joyce had been my ultimate hero for sixty years, but to paint the canvas of his life was daunting. Therefore I decided to depict him as seen by the key figures in his life - Mother, Wife, Mistress of a fleeting moment, his patron Harriet Weaver and his beloved Daughter Lucia, of whom he said her mind was but a transparent leaf away from his.' Written to celebrate the centenary of Ulysses, Joyce's Women premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in September 2022. This revised edition includes changes made by the author during rehearsals and previews of the play's first production.

An unnamed protagonist is on holiday with her new, much-married lover, in the company of the monstrously rich.

'How long would she last? It would be uppermost in all their minds.'

Each day, while the others are out at sea, she is taught to swim. Eventually, she will be expected to perform. The pressure mounts; it is only a matter of time before she snaps.

Edna O'Brien crafts a quietly horrifying scene of eroticism and insecurity, and makes one woman's near-fatal discomfort stand for society's larger trap.

One of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers turns her attention to one of the country's greatest novelists: James Joyce - in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the iconic classic ULYSSES. 'As skilful, stylish and pacy as one would expect from so adept a novelist' Sunday Telegraph 'A delight from start to finish . . . achieves the near impossibility of giving a thoroughly fresh view of Joyce' Sunday Times 'Accessible and passionate, it is a book which should bring Joyce in all his glory and agony to a new and very wide audience' Irish Independent Edna O'Brien depicts James Joyce as a man hammered by Church, State and family, yet from such adversities he wrote works 'to bestir the hearts of men and angels'. The journey begins with Joyce the arrogant youth, his lofty courtship of Nora Barnacle, their hectic sexuality, children, wanderings, debt and profligacy, and Joyce's obsession with the city of Dublin, which he would re-render through his words. Nor does Edna O'Brien spare us the anger and isolation of Joyce's later years, when he felt that the world had turned its back on him, and she asks how could it be otherwise for a man who knew that conflict is the source of all creation.

The legendary Edna O'Brien's tale of a mysterious stranger spellbinding an Irish village is 'the kind of masterpiece that reminds you why you read books in the first place' (Observer). ONE OF THE SUNDAY TIMES' TOP 100 NOVELS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 'Magnificent' (Sunday Times) 'Beautiful' (Financial Times) 'Enthralling' (Times) 'Extraordinary' (Independent) 'Astonishing' (New Yorker) When a man who calls himself a faith healer arrives in a small, west-coast Irish village, the community is soon under the spell of this charismatic stranger from the Balkans. One woman in particular, Fidelma McBride, becomes enthralled in a fatal attraction that leads to unimaginable consequences. 'One of the most interesting and ambitious [books] ever written by an Irish author.' (Irish Times) 'One of the greatest Irish writers, of this or any era.' (Sunday Independent)

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019. Edna O'Brien's wonderful, wild and moving novel shocked the nation on its publication in 1960. Adapted for the stage by the author, The Country Girls, the play, is a highly theatrical and free-flowing telling of this classic coming of age story. This new edition of The Country Girls was published to coincide with its UK premiere at Chichester Festival Theatre in June 2017. Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel Girl will be published by Faber in September 2019, available to pre-order now.

A Times, Evening Standard and Financial Times Book of the Year

I was a girl once, but not any more . . .

A young woman, barely more than a girl herself, must learn to survive with a child of her own, in a world which seems entirely consumed by madness.

As she navigates a landscape of terrors and trials, can she find a place of safety within a society blinkered by mistrust and denial?

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019. 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, 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's stunning new novel Girl will be published by Faber in September 2019, available to pre-order now.

Acclaimed biographer of James Joyce, Edna O'Brien has written a "jaunty" (The New Yorker) biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-four. With "a novelist's understanding of tempo and characterization" (Miami Herald), O'Brien captures the spirit of the man and creates an indelible portrait that explodes the Romantic myth. Byron, as brilliantly rendered by O'Brien, is the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal.

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019. After leaving for a religious community in Belgium, the young woman in A Pagan Place becomes lost in memories of her childhood in rural Ireland, reflecting on the rituals of village life, the people she encountered, the enchanting beauty of the landscape, the concept of home - and the shocking event that led to her departure ... Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel Girl will be published by Faber in September 2019, available to pre-order now.

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019. 'Edna O'Brien writes the most beautiful, aching stories of any writer, anywhere.' Alice Munro Spanning five decades of writing, and winning the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, The Love Object collects the most luminous stories by Edna O'Brien that have bewitched generation after generation. Here you will find tales of families, feuds, enchantment, despair, and the manifold bonds of love. There are stories about the tension between country and city life, the instinct towards escape and nostalgia for home; always crafted in shimmering prose. Her stunning new novel Girl will be published by Faber in September 2019, available to pre-order now.

As James Joyce was working on Finnegans Wake, he asked his friend T.S. Eliot to shepherd an early extract, simply known as 'Work in Progress' into print. This celebrated episode, Anna Livia Plurabelle, was the first part of Joyce's extraordinary text to be published in England, printed in pamphlet form in 1930. It became the best-known section of Finnegans Wake, and one of Joyce's favourites; revised and published independently more times than any other piece. This new edition in the Faber Modern Classics series includes a new foreword by Edna O'Brien. 'His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.' Samuel Beckett

One of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers turns her attention to one of the country's greatest novelists: James Joyce and his relationship with Nora Barnacle - in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the iconic classic ULYSSES. 'Both Joyce and O'Brien have a gift for beauty distilled . . . a work of love' Daily Telegraph 'Short, poetic and powerful' Irish Times It was June 10th, Barnacle Day. He saw her in Nassau Street and they stopped to talk. She thought his blue eyes were those of a Norseman. He was twenty-two, and she, Nora Barnacle, was twenty and employed as a chambermaid in Finn's Hotel. They agreed to meet on June 14th, outside No. 1 Merrion Square, the home of Sir William Wilde, but Nora did not turn up. After a dejected letter from Joyce they met on June 16th, a date which came to be immortalized in literature as Bloomsday. Edna O'Brien paints a miniature portrait of an artist, idealist, insurgent and filled with a secret loneliness. In Nora, he was to find accomplice, collaborator and muse. For all their sexual escalations, Joyce considered their relationship 'a kind of sacrament'. Their life was one of wandering, emotional upheaval and poverty. It was also one that was binding and mysterious, and defied all the mores of intimacy. In prose brimming with life and energy, Edna O'Brien resurrects a relationship of magnificent intensity on the page, and in doing so shows herself to be touched by the genius of the writer she loves above all others.

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019. Edna O'Brien's haunting spectre of a novel, Night, is narrated by one of her most memorable characters, Mary Hooligan. Lying on a four-poster bed, unable to sleep, she recounts her (mis)adventures, courtships, and sexual encounters of the most transgressive kind in a narrative voice of blistering, radical originality. Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel Girl will be published by Faber in September 2019, available to pre-order now.

An evocative play about Virginia Woolf's life and relationships with her husband, Leonard, and her lover, Vita Sackville-West.