If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened. She saw me kissing her father. She saw her father kissing me. The fact that a child got mixed up in it all made us feel that it mattered, that there was no going back.
'The Forgotten Waltz is that rare thing: the literary page turner... It is an acutely tender depiction of the complex familial bonds joining us, a delicate portrait of love, loss and hope, from a formidably talented writer' Claire Kilroy, Financial Times
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An achingly brilliant piece of writing on passion and delusion. Comparisons to Madame Bovary are not overblown, not because it is a wry, clever, philosophical take on adultery - although it is - but because it makes you re-evaluate everything a novel can be... This book is enough to restore your faith in the power of fiction - Independent
Absolute genius - BBC Radio 4
An important novel... It is a rare thing: the literary page turner... An acutely tender depiction of the complex familial bonds joining us, a delicate portrait of love, loss and hope, from a formidably talented writer. - Financial Times
Enright holds you in a story-telling spell. Mesmerising - Red
A love story for our times... In a single sentence [Enright] conjures up that violent pendulum swing of emotion that can blow whole worlds apart... This is the great pleasure of reading Enright: her sheer virtuoso control of language, those compact sentences, with their occasional flares of lyrical beauty and emotional force. - Irish Times
A brave and unusual variation on a familiar theme... She modulates so finely between comedy and pathos, between psychology and physicality, that she conveys a sense of the richness of lived experience... Anne Enright has taken a great risk in writing this book, but she has brought it off superbly - Daily Telegraph
Devastatingly good - Marie Claire
A luminous novel... Haunting, dreamy, sexy and with flashes of salty wit this is one of those novels that you are sorry to see end. It is very much an Irish novel and much of its time but the anatomy of desire and passion are timeless - Daily Express
The real pleasure of the book is the dancing, delicious prose - Evening Standard
Forces us to look in the mirror... It is a discomfiting public examination of conscience, an exposé of our national shortcomings so recently in the limelight. - Irish Independent
That's the Anne Enright voice all right - wry, disabused, reckless, candid, funny - Guardian
[Enright's] amazing ability to engage in lyric flights while keeping her feet on the ground, her way of returing to certain intimate details and of making jumpy little jokes, her habit of using colloquial phrasing to moor Grand Statements, and her rushing, exquisitely turned perceptions - New Statesman
Where the novel compels is in the attendant disquisitions on memory and its rearrangements, both willed and unwilled; the blurring of boundaries, physical and temporal; the vivid presentation of all characters, major and minor...funny and forgiving. - Literary Review
The book...succeeds admirably, because Enright's characters are indeed so ordinary and fallible; they could quite easily be us - Daily Mail
This beautifully written, lyrical novel is a portrait of family tensions and the listless half-light in which a mistress must live - Sunday Express
Enright's prose has a brilliant physicality... Her observations of the Irish boom years are caustic and credible - The Times
Enright has taken a simple plot and produced a touching novel that examines the cost - and the compensations - of love. The heroine is both plausible and sympathetic, while the supporting cast is marshalled with skill, tenderness and humour - Mail on Sunday
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published two collections of stories, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and four novels, most recently The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year, and won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize.
