Down By The River

The road silent, somnolent yet with a speech of its own, speaking back to them, father and child, through trappings of sun and fretted verdure, speaking of the old mutinies and a fresh crime mounting in the blood.

The local community is shocked when a young teenager, Mary, attempts to get an illegal abortion, especially when they discover that she has been raped by her father. O’Brien charts Mary’s emotional and psychological trauma, as her story is dragged first into the public realm and then into the law courts, with her power of choice usurped by militant factions on all sides.

A haunting novel based on a real events.

Author Biography

Edna O’Brien wrote more than twenty celebrated works of fiction, including her classic The Country Girls trilogy, as well as plays and four works of non-fiction, which have been translated into over thirty languages. Her final novel Girl was awarded the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year in 2020. She was the recipient of many honours, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature, as well as being appointed an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017. In 2021, O’Brien was also named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she lived in London for many years before her death in July 2024.