What Are You Like

When Maria turns twenty, she leaves Dublin for New York and falls in love with a man there. Going through his notebook she finds a photograph of herself aged twelve, wearing the blue granddad shirt she had always wanted but never owned - a pair of red espadrilles when hers had been denim blue, and - most bizarrely - her own smile. Maria had never seen herself so clearly: here was the perfect stranger; the same, only different. Anne Enright's astonishing second novel is about twin girls separated soon after birth, who grew apart, completely innocent of the other's existence. Both see the world through images of doubling, of repetition - the strange mirroring effect of walking into the next door neighbour's houe and discovering everything the wrong way round. they feel incomplete, dislocated; so that finding each other will just be like finding themselves. WHAT ARE YOU LIKE? is an exquisitely written disquisition on families and identity; troubling, hilarious and incredible affecting. It confirms Anne Enright as one of the finest young Irish writers, and re-affirms scrupulously poised, always intelligent and, not least, original.