Library Journal
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"It's like there's some secret...but there just isn't," says Rosaleen's daughter. There is a problem, though. Rosaleen's adult children, for the first time in years, are gathering for Christmas in west Clare, Ireland. Rosaleen can't be made happy, and her children are far from trying anymore, if they ever did. Their own lives, which vary so much they seem to inhabit different eras as well as different countries, need tending. Dan is fearfully navigating early 1990s New York's AIDS-devastated gay scene and has found a love he can't even admit to himself is real; Hanna's acting career, which never really took off, is floundering; Constance's health scare underlines the isolation she feels in her marriage; and Emmet, the most distant of them all in every way, is exhausted by Ireland's excesses when he leaves his aid work in Mali. The family's stuttering reunion is capped by a surprise move by Rosaleen that breaks the tension and forces the children to see their mother and her choices in a new light. VERDICT Booker Prize winner -Enright (The Gathering) lays bare the hopes, desperations, and all too brief moments of understanding in family and modern life. Her unsparing look at the difficulties of being in the world will appeal to lovers of literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]-Henrietta Verma, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.Newly chosen as Ireland's first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation's financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and "a raging blank of a human being"; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, "all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink." Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life's larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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The eponymous road of Enright's flawless novel is in County Clare in Ireland, running from the impoverished farm of handsome Pat Madigan in Boolavaun, to a house called Ardeevin, where he wooed Rosaleen Considine, daughter of the town's leading family. Pat and Rosaleen marry and have four children. A volatile drama queen, Rosaleen is the fulcrum about which her children warily move. Even as they mature and flee from her embrace, she exists in their heads, where they continue to blame her for their bad fortunes. In 1980, Rosaleen takes to her bed when Dan, the eldest and her favorite, announces his intention to become a priest. She is even more aggrieved when he abandons the priesthood for the art community in New York in the 1990s and eventually allows his true sexual nature to emerge in a series of ardent gay trysts. Enright (winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering) writes of this time and place with crystalline clarity. The tone is much different in the chapters set in Ardeevin, where the lilt of Irish vernacular permeates the dialogue. Meanwhile Emmet, the second son, is engaged in relief work in Mali, trying to retain his sanity as the death toll from famine mounts and his girlfriend lavishes her love on a mangy dog. Hanna, his sister, is an aspiring actress and a drunk who confronts reality at 37, bitterly ambivalent about being the mother of an unplanned baby. The fourth sibling, Constance, who has married well and lives with her happy family in Limmerick, is her mother's dogsbody and the unappreciated provider. This novel is a vibrant family portrait, both pitiless and compassionate, witty and stark, of simple people living quiet lives of anguish, sometimes redeemed by moments of grace. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

*Starred Review* Domestic fiction as a genre can often be humdrum in its intended goal of capturing the quotidian in family life, or it can be brilliant in its understanding of the exact point where, in family situations, the unique meets the universal. The latter speaks meaningfully and resonantly to all of us, regardless of a particular novel's setting and the specific circumstances from which the characters are derived. Enright, Irish winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering and the first recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz (2011), is appreciated by critics and the general reading public alike as a writer comfortably fitting into the latter category for her exacting yet luminous expressions of family dynamics. In her new novel, she explores a family composed of a mother and her four children as the two boys and the two girls grow up and leave the nest in the west of Ireland. From priest Daniel, who steps into New York's gay and art scene, to the staying-close-to-home Constance, facing the strictures of her own marriage and motherhood, Enright trails the Madigans over three decades, illuminating their trials and triumphs as reflective of not only their distinctive personalities and personal interests but also Irish society moving into the modern era of contraception, economic boom and bust, and open homosexuality. A final chapter, which gathers the now-elderly mother and her middle-aged children back to the family home for Christmas, places their individual lives back into a family perspective. High-Demand Backstory: Enright's stock continues to rise, and the list of the publisher's plans for marketing and publicity for her new novel is extensive.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2015 Booklist