Story of troubled family wins Booker Prize

"The Gathering," an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family, won the Man Booker fiction prize for its Irish author, Anne Enright.

According to the Associated Press:

She is the second Irish writer to win the prize in the past three years, after John Banville’s “The Sea” in 2005.

Enright had been considered a long-shot to take Britain’s most prestigious, and contentious, literary trophy. The award, which carries a prize of $100,000, was bestowed during a ceremony at London’s medieval Guildhall.

“The Gathering” is a family epic set in England and Ireland, in which a brother’s suicide prompts 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty to probe her family’s troubled, tangled history. The judges praised it as “a very accomplished and dramatic novel of family relationships and personal breakdown.”