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'''Shortlisted: Costa Novel Award 2015'''

''The Green Road'' is the story of a family. If the author was anyone other than Anne Enright it would be stereotypically Irish, with all the appropriate characters in place: the boy who goes off to be a priest, the daughter who likes the bottle far too much, the son who does good works and the woman who stays back where she was born and marries a local man, the dead husband who was perhaps just a little bit beneath the wife who plays the ''grande dame'' and is perfect at being needy, whilst all the while maintaining that she needs nothing. But, of course, it ''is'' Anne Enright.