The Gathering - Anne Enright

All big families are the same. I meet them sometimes at parties or in pubs, we announce ourselves and then we grieve-Billy in Boston, and Jimmy-Joe in Jo'burg, doing well-the dead first, then the lost, and then the mad.

There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister. These are just trends, of course, and, late at night, everything makes sense. We pity our mothers, what they had to put up with in bed or in the kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for them- at least I do. The imponderable pain of my mother, against which I have hardened my heart. Just one glass over the odds and I will thump the table, like the rest of them, and howl for her too.

This is a thought-provoking, emotional journey through a family shaken by a death. Enright, in the tradition of great Irish writers, delves into places left uncovered by most people, including most writers. This book is well-deserving of the Booker Prize which it was awarded.

I liked how Enright, focusing primarily on a female sibling in a large family, leads a surreal experience following the death. She notes inter-generational relationships and how those too are somewhat surreal. Everything is new after a death, but everything old surfaces.