What Are You Like

by Anne Enright (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2001

  $11.46

  When Maria turns twenty, she falls in love. She is in the wrong town, and he is the wrong sort of man. Going through his things, she finds a photo of herself when she was twelve years old. She has the same smile, but she is wearing the wrong clothes: she is the same, only different. Anne Enright's astonishing novel moves between Dublin, New York and London, following the lives of the real Maria and the girl in the picture. Stepping through the mirror to tell the story of the two women, both haunted by their missing selves, WHAT ARE YOU LIKE? Is an exquisitely written disquisition on families and identity. It is a modern story, full of genetic jokes, of splitting and dislocation, and it is one of the oldest stories there is: a novel about twins. Threading together the lives of two young women, it confirms Anne Enright as not only the most original Irish writer of her generation, but also as one of the finest, funniest, and most affecting.

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $3.24

• New

  Paperback
  2002

  $15.47

  Anne Enright is one of the most exciting writers of Ireland's younger generation, a beguiling storyteller The Seattle Times has praised for the ... way she writes about women ...their adventures to know who they are through sex, despair, wit and single-minded courage. In What Are You Like?, Maria Delahunty, raised by her grieving father after her mother died during childbirth, finds herself in her twenties awash in nameless longing and in love with the wrong man. Going through his things, she finds a photograph that will end up unraveling a secret more devastating than her father's long mourning, but more pregnant with possibility. Moving between Dublin, New York, and London, What Are You Like? is a breathtaking novel of twins and irretrievable losses, of a woman haunted by her missing self, and of our helplessness against our fierce connection to our origins. What Are You Like? has been selected as a finalist for the Whitbread Award. It is a novel, Newsday wrote, that announces [Enright's] excellence as though it were stamped on the cover in boldface. Richly descriptive ... Slightly surreal, revelatory images are hallmarks of Enright's writing, which beguiles throughout. -- Melanie Rehak, US Weekly Cool, wicked, and quintessentially Irish ... Anne Enright tells a sharp, stylish tale in an accent all her own. -- Annabel Lyon, The National Post (Toronto)