The Country Girls

I like fiction that is both sad and funny because that approach represents the most satisfying literary approximation of the contours of real life.

This means I like Irish writers. Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy is a series of three novels that follows the lives of two friends in 1950s Ireland from the time they were naïve schoolgirls until they became world-weary married women.

The books were banned in Ireland—as much for O’Brien’s audacity in challenging an entrenched literary patriarchy as for their frank sexuality—but that (now quaint-seeming) controversy should not detract a reader’s attention from what is a richly-rewarding,… show more.