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Back to topThe Forgotten Waltz: A Novel (Paperback)
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October 2011 Indie Next List
“Enright's new book is a beautifully written drama of passionate love and desire. In a suburb of Dublin, Gina Moynihan remembers first meeting the love of her life, a married man with a young daughter, and the ensuing story illustrates the complications of marriage, family, and friendships. The characters are richly described, and the story is both touching and real.”
— Ellen Burns, Books on the Common, Ridgefield, CT
Description
Winner of the 2012 Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction
"A tour de force."—Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review
"A new, unapologetic kind of adultery novel. Narrated by the proverbial other woman—Gina Moynihan, a sharp, sexy, darkly funny thirtysomething IT worker—The Forgotten Waltz charts an extramarital affair from first encounter to arranged, settled, everyday domesticity…This novel’s beauty lies in Enright’s spare, poetic, off-kilter prose—at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It’s built of starling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another. Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who’ve ever lived." —Elle
About the Author
Anne Enright is author of seven novels, most recently Actress. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She lives in Dublin.
Praise For…
A beautiful, subtle examination of intimacy.
— Wall Street Journal
Exhilarating…[The Forgotten Waltz] explores a life-altering affair between two seemingly unremarkable Irish professionals with such exquisite attention, honesty, and wit as to make every sentence throb with life.
— Kimberly Cutter - Marie Claire
Darkly funny, and laser sharp.
— Elizabeth Taylor - Chicago Tribune
Stunning.
— Daily Beast
Everything in [The Forgotten Waltz] is perfectly engineered, and it’s so beautifully written that you could read it once just for the dazzle of the prose, then start over for the content…[T]his book makes me feel that Enright could do anything…It’s hard to say which is more satisfying about this book: its emotional complexities or the frugal elegance of its prose…I suggest you climb into this book, lean back and trust Enright to take you wherever she wants to go.
— Roxana Robinson - Washington Post
Casting aside cultural bromides about the immorality of affairs, Enright puts us squarely in the center of a terrible truth: Love can be miraculous—and still destroy everything in its path.
— Lizzie Skurnick - O, The Oprah Magazine
Enright’s razor-sharp writing turns every ordinary detail into a weapon, to create a story that cuts right to the bone.
— New York Review of Books
Anne Enright tells a funny, dark, no-judgments tale of rapture and ambivalence…The real magic is in Enright’s prose, which burrows into characters like fingernails into skin, peeling back the hidden layers of ordinary interactions and momentary thoughts.
— Joy Press - Los Angeles Times
Enright—wistful, equivocal, angry—gives voice to her characters with remarkable sympathy and precision, and she is never heavy-handed in tracing the connections between the private and public lives of capital.
— The New Yorker
An achingly brilliant piece of writing on passion and delusion…Enough to restore your faith in the power of fiction.
— The Independent (UK)
A gorgeous critique of Ireland as the Celtic Tiger draws its dying breaths…[A] masterful and deeply satisfying novel.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
In rueful, witty, unpredictable and compassionate prose, Enright gives expression to subtle, affecting shades of human interaction.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
A breathtaking work that will surprise you.
— Library Journal (starred review)