The Country Girls

Kate and Baba grow up as country girls in Ireland, and both want more than the life laid out for them. Kate is the romantic one and looks for love. Baba is the practical one and takes whatever comes her way.

The two leave for Dublin, intent on making their mark there and then on the wider world. In the city they run through comic and touching misadventures, wild flirtations and reckless passions, each pulling the other along.

Love alters their paths. Their lives take unexpected turns and head in separate directions, and each woman has to learn to manage on her own.

The book collects a trilogy of Edna O'Brien's early novels. Across the three, it follows the pain and joy of youth, a marriage that goes wrong, and the loss of a friendship and of love. The tone moves between humour and ache, with the sharp, heightened senses of childhood in the early pages.