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Anne Enright is one of Ireland's most exciting new writers, a beguiling storyteller of warm humor and wry lyricism. In her American debut, she gives us a novel of the fierce bonds of origin and the connections and disjunctions of family that will establish her as a wise, fresh voice in fiction. At the opening of What Are You Like? Berts, a new father, struggles to love his baby daughter, simultaneously mourning the wife who died giving her life. Raised in the shadow of his quiet grief, Maria finds herself at twenty in New York City, awash in nameless longing and falling in love with the wrong sort of man. Going through her lover's things, she finds a photograph of herself aged twelve, in clothes she's never worn, a place she's never been. It will send her home to Ireland, to the slow unraveling of a secret that may prove more devastating than Berts's long sadness, but more pregnant with possibility. Moving between Dublin, New York, and London, What Are You Like? is the story of a woman haunted by her missing self. Troubling and hilarious, it posits an unforgettable chaos theory of family, of daughters sent out into a world that is altered forever by their leaving, and of our helplessness against our fierce connection to our homes and the people who give us life. "This book is so sad that you want to laugh out loud. It deals with areas of experience and patterns of living that no one else has noticed. As Dylan Thomas said about At Swim-Two-Birds, 'If your sister is a big loud boozy girl, then give her this book.' " -- Colm Toibin

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