Anne Enright offers no epigraph to her latest novel, The Green Road.

One that would be apposite, however, as it would be to much of Enright's work, is the famous opening to Anna Karenin: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." In common with The Gathering, which in 2007 won her the Man Booker prize, her sixth novel is concerned with a family that has been dispersed but which comes together for a special occasion. Then it was a wake; here it is Christmas. Immediately, one thinks of another literary antecedent, namely James Joyce's emblematic short story, 'The Dead', from which Enright could have swiped another suitable overture: "One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."

Rosaleen Madigan is the kind of matriarch who instills in her children love and loathing in equal measure. Aged 76 and widowed, she is coming to the end of a life that has not been without its frustrations and disappointments. She married in passion but beneath her and transferred her hopes to her four children, none of whom in her eyes has fulfilled their promise. Meanwhile, Ireland is emerging from the eighteenth century into the twentieth, bringing enlightened attitudes, in particular with regard to homosexuality, but also an economic crash which threatens to stifle progress and inaugurate a new era of emigration which made previous generations rush to find their fortunes elsewhere. Part of the power of Enright's storytelling, like Joyce's, is in the enmeshing of the personal with the political, the poetic with the prosaic, the everyday with the eternal.

The novel opens in 1980 when Rosaleen's brood have yet to take flight. Hanna, the youngest, is first to feature, sent by her hypochondriacal mother on an errand to the local chemist, watching in horror as her father wrings a chicken's neck, observing through the half-formed perception of a child the dinner table drama when her brother Dan announces that he is going to be a priest. It is the last mentioned that unhinges Rosaleen who castigates herself for her son's capture by the church. "He is my son," she says, "and I don't like him, and he doesn't like me either. And there's no getting out of all that, because it's a vicious circle and I have only myself to blame." Rosaleen's solution is to throw a hissy fit and take to her bed.

Initially, the chapters focus on the children. Unexpectedly, Dan does not enter the priesthood but pitches up in New York in 1991 when Aids is rife. Though gay, he initially fools himself into thinking that he can make his relationship with a woman work but he soon abandons that notion and is having "bitterness and blame and pointless sex" with men. Enright is descriptively unhindered in a manner that would have seen earlier Irish writers banned and blacklisted and forced to decamp. Immersed in the art scene, Dan - in whom I spied the ghost of Bruce Chatwin - survives while others succumb to disease. Enright brilliantly catches the period and the manic indifference to the consequences of those for whom sex reigns supreme.

Constance, the oldest daughter, has a life that most closely mirrors that of her mother, who lives nearby. She has children, a property-developer husband who is riding the Celtic Tiger, and a house in the mid-west, in County Clare, where sea and mountains meet and the eponymous green road runs across the Burren is both real and symbolic, a path in the middle of nowhere leading to who knows where. Constance, who over the years has grown fat and fearful, fills her days in domestic drudgery and wondering what might have been and whether the lump under her arm is malignant.

Finally, there is Emmet, who is employed in do-goodery in Mali. We have reached 2002 and he is living with a fellow aid worker called Alice. She, we learn, is driven to suffering, as he is. In common with his siblings, Emmet is struggling to make sense of the life he has made for himself. Mali, like Manhattan, is in the grip of an epidemic which could be controlled if only the locals took more care with hygiene. As Enright, who is always alive to the telling detail, has Emmet reflect: "no one survives when the cook scratches his arse and then decides not to bother washing his hands."

Like so many families, the Madigans have drifted apart both emotionally and geographically. But if The Green Road can be said to be 'about' anything it is that - pace the old saw - blood is thicker than water. Whatever her faults Rosaleen understands this and uses it to her advantage. Thus, when she announces that she is going to sell the home in which her children were raised, it precipitates the kind of reunion in which a writer such as Enright, who is so adept at pulling together disparate strands into a neat bundle, revels.

But what truly distinguishes The Green Road from so many other contemporary novels is the manner in which it is written. The pages slip by and nary a wrong note is struck. It is an enviable achievement and one which cannot help but bolster Enright's already considerable reputation. She may not be in Tolstoy's or Joyce's league but she is pretty damn impressive.

The Green Road, by Anne Enright is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £16.99