Book Club Guide

The Gathering

by Anne Enright · 2007 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Irish family memory and what it deliberately forgets
Shame, silence and the Catholic legacy in Irish life
The narrator who is trying to put something together that will not stay assembled

About this book

Veronica Hegarty assembles her family for the funeral of her brother Liam, who has drowned himself, and finds herself trying to reconstruct the truth of what happened to Liam in their grandmother's house when they were children. Enright's Booker Prize-winning novel is about family memory, silence, and the specifically Irish relationship to shame.

Published in 2007, The Gathering won the Booker Prize. Enright described it as a novel written in grief and anger, and said the writing was not cathartic but felt necessary. It is one of the central texts of contemporary Irish fiction.

Discussion questions

Veronica is trying to reconstruct what happened to Liam as a child, but her reconstruction is unreliable — she says so herself. How does Enright use this unreliability — and what is Veronica actually searching for?
The novel is saturated with the specific quality of Irish family life — large, noisy, vaguely competitive, united in avoidance. How does Enright develop this without caricature?
The central event Veronica tries to reconstruct involves abuse in a family home. How does Enright handle this — and what does the difficulty of narrating it say about how Ireland has historically treated such events?
The Gathering is often described as a dark novel. Does it offer anything beyond darkness — and what would Enright say if asked about the possibility of healing?
The novel won the Booker Prize. What does it do that earns the recognition — and is it the kind of difficult, demanding novel that prizes often reward?