New Today: Yesterday’s Weather by Anne Enright

You can say what you like about the Man Booker Award, but winning one certainly means that an author’s very next book is going to draw attention and careful consideration. Expect that to be the case for Anne Enright’s new collection, Yesterday’s Weather (McLelland & Stewart). Winning the Man Booker in 2007 for the wonderful The Gathering, even the Irish writer’s fans might be slightly put off by Yesterday’s Weather, which collects the writers stories from the last two decades. In the book, the stories com to us “in reverse chronological order,” Enright tells us in her introduction, “partly, it has to be said, for the cosmic effect.”

If there is levity in Enright’s introduction, there is little in the book itself. “Working on the stories,” she writes, “I was surprised by the pity I felt for my younger self -- so assured and so miserable at the same time.” Later she writes that, “What I seem to be saying -- a little to my own surprise -- is that the person may change, but the writer endures.”