Organized thematically, O’Brien meanders from her deeply Catholic, decidedly respectable upbringing in Drewsboro, County Clare, where the budding young writer experienced the sensuous rural impressions that imbued her early work, through schooling with the Galway nuns and a four-year apprenticeship at a chemist’s shop in Dublin.

A wonderful book, a luminous journey through the loves and conflicts of a single life which is many lives in one, and a landmark of restraint and honesty.Demure reflections on her celebrated literary life well lived comprise this lovely memoir by Irish novelist and short story author O’Brien (Saints and Sinners). He simply walks over and, without a word, kisses her.

Lurking near the pool, hoping for it to empty, she realises that Jude Law is walking towards her. She wants to swim in the pool, but hesitates because she can't swim she needs arm-bands, and knows that when her arm-bands blow up they advertise NIVEA CREME.

She hopes Jude won't come - he'd disrupt the equilibrium. (Connery, Brando, Gore Vidal, Jackie Onassis, anyone?) Her method is somehow restrained yet sumptuous: as she says, there's 'more this / that / the other.more everything.' One anecdote towards the end will illustrate: she's staying at Antonia and Harold's delightful place in Dorset, and there's talk of Jude Law dropping by to discuss a script. The earlier parts, about her childhood and young womanhood, and the later about her ageing, are the most vivid her mid-life of fame and friendship with all the glossy names of the film world perhaps less so - though I admit I'm a sucker for such stuff. What I had not expected was honesty about her weaknesses - her inability to withstand her husband's demand for her earnings, her near-suicide - and a political engagement which is scorching in its attack on the Catholic Church and which takes on the complexity of the Northern Irish Troubles. And with the bonus of her own voice: breathy, snatched, occasionally scornful (often of herself), wry, and always lyrical. Edna O'Brien reading Edna O'Brien? What more could I want? Well, I got what I wanted: haunting evocation of inhibited Irish childhood, the bliss and despair of love, the mythology of landscape and of fame, all transmitted with her inimitable language and verve.

Country Girl by Edna O'Brien