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James and Nora

Edna O'Brien

One of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers turns her attention to one of the country's greatest novelists: James Joyce and his relationship with Nora Barnacle - in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the iconic classic ULYSSES.

'Both Joyce and O'Brien have a gift for beauty distilled . . . a work of love'
Daily Telegraph

'Short poetic and powerful'
Irish Times


It was June 10th Barnacle Day. He saw her in Nassau Street and they stopped to talk. She thought his blue eyes were those of a Norseman. He was twenty-two and she Nora Barnacle was twenty and employed as a chambermaid in Finn's Hotel. They agreed to meet on June 14th outside No. 1 Merrion Square the home of Sir William Wilde but Nora did not turn up. After a dejected letter from Joyce they met on June 16th a date which came to be immortalized in literature as Bloomsday.

Edna O'Brien paints a miniature portrait of an artist idealist insurgent and filled with a secret loneliness. In Nora he was to find accomplice collaborator and muse. For all their sexual escalations Joyce considered their relationship 'a kind of sacrament'. Their life was one of wandering emotional upheaval and poverty. It was also one that was binding and mysterious and defied all the mores of intimacy.

In prose brimming with life and energy Edna O'Brien resurrects a relationship of magnificent intensity on the page and in doing so shows herself to be touched by the genius of the writer she loves above all others.

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  • Classification : Biography & Memoir
  • Pub Date : JUN 11, 2020
  • Imprint : Weidenfeld & Nicolson
  • Page Extent : 80
  • Binding : PB
  • ISBN : 9781474616812
  • Price : INR 520
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Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien wrote more than twenty celebrated works of fiction, including her classic The Country Girls trilogy, as well as plays and four works of non-fiction, which have been translated into over thirty languages. Her final novel Girl was awarded the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year in 2020. She was the recipient of many honours, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature, as well as being appointed an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017. In 2021, O'Brien was also named Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she lived in London for many years before her death in July 2024.

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