The September Art of Reading book club features Colm in conversation with writer Una Mannion about The Ante-Room by Kate O'Brien. Listen here or watch below.  

The Laureate says “This novel is written with great intensity, being set over a time period of three days in which the focus is on the entire life of a single family, all the secrets and treacheries coming into the open. Time and character are dealt with in this book with sharp insight, masterful precision.”

Kate O’Brien was born in 1897 in Limerick. A graduate of UCD, she was an internationally acclaimed fiction writer. In her early career she worked as a journalist and found initial literary success as a playwright. She also wrote short fiction, literary essay, literary criticism and travel writing. Her first novel, Without My Cloak (1931), won the Hawthornden and the James Tait Black Memorial prizes. She wrote nine novels in total, including Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941), both of which were banned in Ireland.

Her novels were very popular and widely read in her time, both in Ireland and abroad and her most successful novel, That Lady (1946), was made into a Hollywood film. She died in 1974.

Una Mannion is a writer and teacher living in County Sligo. In 2021, her debut novel, A Crooked Tree, was published by Faber in the UK and Ireland, and Harper Books in the USA. It won the Kate O'Brien Prize and was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards in the Newcomer of the Year category. She is programme chair of Writing + Literature at Atlantic Technological University and edits The Cormorant, a broadsheet of poetry and prose.