The Alternatives
Olwen was plunged prematurely into adulthood when her parents died in tragic circumstances. She and her three younger sisters – each single, each with a PhD – are now in their thirties and leading disparate, distanced lives. Until one day Olwen, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the Earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her home. Together for the first time in years, her three siblings descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t actually want to be found. In an isolated rural bungalow they reach into their uncommon past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future. Fiercely witty and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers.
Caoilinn Hughes
Caoilinn Hughes is an Irish writer whose second novel, The Wild Laughter (2020) won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award 2021, was longlisted for the 2021 Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for three other awards. Her first novel, Orchid & the Wasp (2018), won the Collyer Bristow Prize 2019, was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, and shortlisted for four other awards. Her poetry book, Gathering Evidence (2014) won the Irish Times Shine/Strong Award. Her short stories have been awarded the Moth Short Story Prize, the Irish Book Awards’ Story of the Year, and an O. Henry Prize. She has been Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and is currently a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library for 2023-2024
Scaffolding
In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses.
Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood…
Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space.
A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
