The Country Girl by Edna O’Brien (Faber, £20) First, tales of two taxis. Edna O’Brien took one to Kensington Palace during the Swinging London period of the 1960s, having been invited there by her friend Lord Snowdon. “The driver, who happened to be Irish,” she writes, “was dumbfounded at the fact that I was being allowed ‘indoors’.” Years later, summoned to the White House by Hillary Clinton during the presidency of her husband Bill, she again travelled by cab. Fellow guest Jack Nicholson, whom she asked for a lift home, then “regaled the group with the astonishing fact that I had taken a taxi to the White House, something unheard of in those echelons”.

As these episodes suggest, Ms O’Brien has enjoyed many brushes with celebrity during her long (b. 1930) and eventful life. Big names are scattered through her book, among them those of Jackie Onassis, Gore Vidal, Gregory Peck, Sean Connery, Norman Mailer, John Huston and Harold Pinter. She informs us at one point, without comment, that the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham considered her a social climber. Some might think he had a point.

Can it be called climbing, though, when those around you at the eminence would be as likely in their memoirs, should they write them, to brandish your name in the faces of their readers? Through her prodigious skill with words — clearly revealed on every page of this book — Ms O’Brien achieved celebrity early in her career as a writer (having started out, curiously, as a pharmacist). She maintains it today, despite being considered by some newspapers, as she notes ruefully, “past my sell-by date”.

Her status as one of Ireland’s (indeed, the world’s) finest 20th-century writers was established in her first novel The Country Girls (1960), a first-person account of a girl’s sexual awakening, written during her days as a reader in a London publishing house, which won her few friends in her Irish homeland or, indeed, at her former home. Letters from her mother “spoke of the shock, the hurt and the disgust” of neighbours. “I had sent her a copy, which she did not mention as having received, and one day, after her death, I would find it in a bolster case, with offending words daubed out in black ink.” Jealous of her success, her Czech/Irish writer husband Ernest Gebler nevertheless drew comfort from the money her books earned. Royalty cheques all had to be handed over to him. When one was not, he physically attacked her.

Following the collapse of this clearly doomed marriage, she embarked on a series of love affairs, some of them unimaginably painful, which supply much of the emotional ‘meat’ of this riveting book.

n Edna O’Brien discusses the book at the Thame Arts and Literary Festival at 2pm on Saturday at The Spread Eagle Hotel, 0871 288 3420.