The Country Girls Trilogy

Loosely based on Edna O’Brien’s own life, The Country Girls Trilogy follows two rural Irish girls who attend convent school and then move to Dublin, where they have a variety of adventures with men and boys. This is one of the great books of modern Irish literature, with beautiful moments of childhood innocence, the excitement and rush of moving to the big city, and the joys and fears of early sexuality. (The book is not sexually obscene, but its humorous approach and lack of embarrassment around sexuality would cause it to be banned in Ireland.)