Opening Night
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A01=Sara Baume
Anne Enright
Anne Tyler
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Best of young British Novelists
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Product details
- ISBN 9781803513386
- Dimensions: 135 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 02 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Granta Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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'I met Mollie's paintings before I met Mollie.'
Shortly after the imposed isolation of the pandemic, Sara Baume came across a painting at a pop-up exhibition in a renovated shed in rural West Cork. It so intrigued her that she was inspired to make contact with the artist. Mollie Douthit, a North Dakotan exile, was living and working alone in a log cabin down a ravaged laneway surrounded by rugged coastline. Sara and Mollie discovered they had much in common - a dysfunctional attitude towards companionship, a devotion to the daily rituals of their respective art practices, an affinity with nature. They started to meet every month for soup and punishing swims in the Atlantic.
Sara fell under the spell of Mollie's paintings, pictures that welded memory and reality, and gradually started to write about them, curious as to whether any particular insight might be provided by the intimacy of friendship with the artist, and whether it might be possible to craft a book in the style of the paintings. But what she had not anticipated was that a settled period in her own life would coincide with a period of tumultuous change for Mollie, and soon she found herself squabbling with more complex ideas, about community and nationality, about neurosis and mysticism, about love and pain and the power of art.
Sara Baume is the author of the novels Spill Simmer Falter Wither, A Line Made by Walking and Seven Steeples, and the non-fiction work handiwork. She has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, the Rooney Prize, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and an Irish Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Folio Prize and nominated for many more. In 2023 she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in West Cork, Ireland.
