I’m sure she would hate it, but I call Irish author Anne Enright ‘Aunty Anne’ behind her back. An aunt I can snuggle under the covers with and share delicious secrets and laugh at what we did ‘back in the day’, as she would say. The phrase smacks of nostalgia: not just any old day, but the day when life was better, or at least more vivid, than today. My friend Sylvia in Galway uses it whenever we reminisce about the 1970s, messing about in MacGillycuddy’s Reeks.

Last week Readings Bookshop hosted a surprise event: our own Jane Sullivan was to interview Anne Enright on Zoom. A chance to catch up with Aunty and have a giggle. And for the author to promote her latest novel, Actress, as it lands on Australian bookshelves. No hard sell with her: she is closer to shooting herself in the foot, as she berates herself for writing the same book over again. I wouldn’t let that put you off.

Now I have a copy of Actress in my hand, I am delighted to find that same voice, the wry Dubliner with the rapier wit, on the page. I believe, after six acclaimed literary novels (The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize), she has loosened her literary stays and found a voice that is no less eloquent for all its cheeky familiarity.

In the interview with Jane Sullivan, she champions her fellow Irish authors Sally Rooney, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns, who have broken away from masculine tradition with a voice of their own. And yet, even-handedly and in spite of her fight against misogyny, she says ‘Irish masculinity can be a lyrical, poetic tradition, the nicest thing.’

Aunty Anne gives us the best of both worlds: the lyrical tradition of Irish literature and the outspoken female Irish voice of today. The key to her style is her love of language. For her, it is language that drives her, and leads her one way or the other in her storytelling. And there the magic lies.