Yesterday's Weather

In Yesterday's Weather, Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright presents a series of deeply moving stories about women stirred, bothered, or fascinated by men they cannot understand, or understand too well. Enright's characters are haunted by the ghosts of the lives they might have led lit by new flames, old flames, and flames that are guttering out. A woman's one night stand is illuminated by dreams of a young boy on a cliff road, another's is thwarted by an swarm of somnolent bees. A pregnant woman is stuck in a slow lift with a tactile American stranger, a naked mother changes a nappy in a hotel bedroom, and waits for her husband to come back from the bar. These are sharp, vivid stories of loss and yearning, of surrender to responsibilities or to unexpected delight; all share the unsettling, dislocated reality, the subversive wit and awkward tenderness that have marked Anne Enright as one of our most thrillingly gifted writers.