It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
The Portable Virgin

The Portable Virgin

Summary

Discover Man Booker winner Anne Enright's first collection of short stories.

'Elegant, scrupulously poised, always intelligent and, not least, original' Angela Carter

The characters in Anne Enright's fierce and witty first collection of stories stand at an oblique angle to society. Full of desire, but out of kilter, their response to a dislocated reality is mutinous, wild, unforgettable.

'Quirky, subversive, original wit and an imaginative linguistic fluency' Irish Times

Reviews

  • Witty and acerbic...unusual and elegant. She is a writer to watch
    Today

About the author

Anne Enright

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and seven novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gáis Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature. She is also the recipient of the 2022 Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2024 Writers' Prize for Fiction.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more