The Green Road

The Green Road is a 2015 novel by Irish writer Anne Enright. It concerns a family from County Clare, Ireland and relates the changing family dynamics of Rosaleen Madigan and her children Dan, Emmet, Constance, and Hanna. A third person voice narrates the story in past tense. The book is presented in two sections. The first part describes the children leaving their home in Ireland in order to try to create lives for themselves. The second part finds the children returning to the family property, Ardeevin, when their mother decides that she is going to sell it.

Hanna is eleven years old when the story begins. Dan announces to the family that he intends to become a priest. While Rosaleen retires to her bed, Hanna and her father go to the family farm, where they kill a chicken for the family’s Easter dinner. Quickly, the timeframe shifts to the early 1990s. Dan is now living in New York City. He is not a priest, but instead a salesman and later as an assistant at an art gallery. Dan is struggling with his sexual identity and is involved with a gay man named Billy. Dan tells Billy that he will be getting married, but the two continue to sleep together. When his affair with Billy ends, Dan returns to Isabelle, his girlfriend. Dan does not visit Billy in the hospital when he is dying of AIDS.

The focus now turns to Constance who is living in County Clare near her mother. She finds a lump in her breast and awaits a mammogram. She receives word that she is healthy. While she is waiting for the news, however, she speakswith a woman named Margaret. Margaret does not receive the same good news. When Constance returns home she finds that her husband has not, as she had thought, forgotten she was having the test.



Emmet has been living in Mali. By the early 2000s, he is working with a relief organization. During this time, Emmet has a relationship with a woman named Alice. At one point, Alice takes in a stray dog although the local people consider dogs to be unclean. While Alice is away for a short time, Emmet lets the dog go back outside where it is poisoned. Emmet does not empathize with Alice when she mourns the dog’s death, which prompts her to leave him.

The focus turns to Rosaleen. She is living in the family home without her children. She writes Christmas cards to her children and thinks of the relationship she had with each of them. Finding herself unhappy and stuck on the first floor of the house due to physical disability, she makes up her mind to sell the home. This leads to the second part of the novel and the homecoming of her children. Dan has settled into life in Toronto with a man named Ludo. Ludo suggests that Dan return to Ireland. This makes Dan realize his love for Ludo and he agrees to marry him. Hanna is living in Dublin. She is an alcoholic actress who cannot find work and has a young baby. She recently hospitalized herself following a drunken fall which allowed her child to reach a alcohol-filled water bottle. Her boyfriend has taken the baby and told Hanna to have Christmas without him.

Constance meets Dan at the airport and takes him to Ardeevin. Constance then goes shopping for Christmas dinner. Old resentments resurface and the family has an uneasy Christmas Eve. The siblings take leave of each other to calm down and Rosaleen goes walking to ponder her past and regrets. She takes a fall and injures herself, then tries to find shelter. Rosaleen’s children come together in order to search for her. They locate her in an abandoned cottage. They bring her home and return to their own lives. They remain just as distant from each other as ever, but thinking of the potential death of Rosaleen helps them deal with the problems in their own lives. In the end, Rosaleen goes to Emmet’s apartment. She tells him that Constance has thrown her out, but in actuality Constance needs surgery and is unable to care for Rosaleen. Rosaleen feels that she should have been more attentive.



The Guardian praised the book saying, “In many ways, The Green Road works best if we think of it as a series of short stories...the book is far more interesting, and more moving, when Enright’s characters are allowed to step freely through the pages: battered, beautiful, dancing to the habitual music of Enright’s exquisite style.”