Rick O’Shea: The new book I’ll recommend to everyone I meet... and more poets who write stunning prose

I feel a unique anticipation when there’s a new book due from a writer whose work I especially love. It can be someone I’ve read all my life or a new author on their second novel, it doesn’t matter. If it falls flat, I’ll be in low-grade mourning for a little while, even if I know I’ll read the next book in case this one was a blip.

But there is almost no greater joy than when I finish a book from one of those authors and know that I’m going to spend the rest of the year recommending it at every possible opportunity. I have my first one of those of 2024 to start this week.

In The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes, three Irish sisters, scattered far and wide for years, come home to locate their eldest sibling, who left her home one night and disappeared off the grid.

I’m conscious that my poor one-line pitch here does the book no justice whatsoever. It’s about almost everything — family, the climate, the future, class, food, geography, responsibility, philosophy — and is full of images and ideas that will stop you in your tracks.

In a couple of chapters when the sisters are together, she switches the storytelling device into a stage play. It’s high risk and might have derailed the whole story. Instead, it makes complete sense, and it matches the intensity those scenes need.

I felt joyful by the end — it’s just glorious.

If it doesn’t end up on a hatload of awards shortlists by the end of the year I will eat an actual real-world hat.

I first met Caoilinn when I presented The Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio 1 for a few years in the mid-2010s. Her debut collection Gathering Evidence was utterly unique — poetry that made spectacular forays into science, particle physics, avalanches and moments of scientific discovery.

It turned out she was one of a group of poets I got to know during my time on the programme who then went on to write amazing prose. So, the rest of this week’s recommendations are also all novels and non-fiction by people who began (and in many cases also continue) their writing careers as poets.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat is that rarest of things — a book that, on the face of it, I thought probably wasn’t for me, but that instead was my book of the year in 2020. It’s both a longform essay and a work of autofiction where she goes on a personal quest to unpick the story of one of the great poems of the Irish oral tradition from the 18th century — the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire.

She discovers it when young, then comes back to it later in life while bringing up four children and undertaking amateur research into the poem. She talks about her affinity with the writer, backgrounding it with her continuing everyday life. A Ghost In The Throat is unlike anything else you will ever read.

Motherhood is also at the centre of Alice Kinsella’s more recent Milk: On Motherhood and Madness. Becoming pregnant in her mid-20s, she moves with her partner to a new part of Ireland — Milk flips back and forward through her life over about 18 months from conception to birth through to her first months with her baby.

On top of that, she layers reflections on how she is changing, finding it hard to write, and thinking about how the state treated mothers through generations back to her grandmother’s time. I was more than a little chuffed when one of the many kind words I had said about it turned up on the cover of the new paperback. It is indeed “spellbinding”.

For my final pick this week, I’m going to challenge you. Sarah Crossan has a unique career straddling forms — she writes incredible Young Adult novels in blank verse.

Here is the Beehive was her first novel for adults — an intense, passionate, almost unhinged story of Ana, a solicitor, finding out in the opening paragraphs that Connor, the man she has been having an affair with, has died.

His widow knew nothing about the affair but is calling to talk about the will he made through Ana’s firm.

She takes us back and forth through Ana and Connor meeting, falling in love, his sudden death and then Ana’s compulsion to ingratiate herself into the life of his widow Rebecca. It is heartbreaking.

Her new novel, about a woman discovering her husband’s animatronic sex doll in the garage, is called Hey, Zoey and is out at the end of the month.

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