The Gathering

The Gathering is a novel by the Irish writer Anne Enright, published in 2007. It won the Booker Prize that year, and its sales more than doubled after the prize was announced.

The title refers to the funeral of Liam Hegarty, who killed himself in the sea at Brighton. His mother and eight of the nine surviving Hegarty children come together in Dublin for the wake, and the novel is narrated by his sister Veronica, who is thirty-nine and who has her own household to account for as well.

Enright described the book as the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie, and it is built as an inner journey rather than a plot: Veronica works through her memories in order to derive some meaning from what happened to her brother and to her family. The book takes place in Ireland and England and moves between the two as the wake goes on. It is told in a single voice that is unsentimental about grief and about the people who are left.