In a paragraph, sometimes even in one sentence, Anne Enright can lure you from the mundane to the sublime with a bleakly humorous patter of observations and abdications. This is not at all novelistic: it is how life is survived from one minute to the next.

Her phrases have the cadence of a softly falling tide: “What amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy– and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.”

Other favourites: Eilís Dillon and Edna O'Brien

Ed O’Loughlin is a novelist.