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Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. Anne Enright describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her experience of having babies, from the exhaustion of early pregnancy to first smiles and becoming acquainted with the long reaches of the night. Everyone, from parents to the mildly curious, can delight in Enright''s funny, eloquent and unsentimental account of having babies. Selected from the book Making Babies by Anne Enright VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world''s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human Also in the Vintage Minis series: Fatherhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard Motherhood by Helen Simpson Drinking by John Cheever Sisters by Louisa May Alcott
About the author
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 eight novels, including
The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Other award include the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz, the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award and Novel of the Year (which she has won twice), the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature and the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction. Most recently she won the 2024 Writers' Prize for Fiction and the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.
Summary
Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. The author describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her experience of having babies, from the exhaustion of early pregnancy to first smiles and becoming acquainted with the long reaches of the night.
Report
Fizzingly entertaining. Reading it is like having a conversation with your funniest friend. Enright has pulled off that rarest of tricks: writing brilliantly about happiness Sunday Times
