The Country Girls Trilogy

As dramatised on BBC Radio 4, Edna O'Brien's iconic trilogy of novels - The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl and Girls in their Married Bliss - depicts the lives and loves of two girls in rural 1950s Ireland. Edna O'Brien's debut novels revolutionised Irish literature in the 1960s. Banned by the authorities as 'indecent and obscene' and burned by the clergy, they were instantly notorious for their frank portrayal of sexual desire: but scandal soon became fame, and made this coming-of-age story a bestseller and instant classic. Caithleen 'Kate' Brady and Bridget 'Baba' Brennan have grown up in the repressive atmosphere of a small Irish village after World War II. Kate is a romantic, looking for love; Baba is a reckless survivor. After being expelled from convent school, they dream of conquering the bright lights of Dublin - but are rewarded with bad faith, bad luck, and bad sex; marry for the wrong reasons, then betray for the wrong reasons; and fight - in their unique ways - the expectations forced upon young 'girls' of every era that dictate the women they become. Published in an omnibus edition with a new foreword by Eimear McBride, Edna O'Brien's portrait of innocence and youth, love and despair, hope and reality, continues to inspire new generations of readers with its bravery, lyricism, humour, and courage. This ebook features the first chapter of Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel, Girl, published by Faber in September 2019 and available to pre-order now.

Edna O'Brien wrote more than twenty celebrated novels, including her classic The Country Girls Trilogy, as well as multiple plays and works of non-fiction, which have been translated into over thirty languages. Her final novel was the acclaimed Girl, which won the Kerry Group Prize for Fiction in 2020. She was the recipient of many accolades, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O'Connor Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. In 2018, O'Brien was appointed an honorary Dame of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2021, she was also awarded the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she lived in London for many years before her death on 27 July 2024. Eimear McBride is the author of two novels: The Lesser Bohemians (James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, Irish Novel of the Year, the Goldsmiths Prize, and others). She was the inaugural creative fellow at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading and occasionally writes for the Guardian, TLS, New Statesman and the Irish Times.