Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

(Hardback)

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Description

The new novel from the Booker-prize-longlisted author of HOW TO BUILD A BOAT Claire O'Connor's life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved from cosmopolitan London back home to the rugged west of Ireland to care for her dying father. Now, a couple of years later, Claire learns that Tom has moved nearby for work. She must decide if he has come for her or for himself, and unravel what went wrong in their past. Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While she tries to maintain a normal life - obsessing over the internet and trad wives, going to work, and minding her own business - Tom's return stirs up old memories and the stories trapped within the walls of the old house that looms nearby. As the violence of the past collides with the mundane reality of Claire's everyday life, she must confront whether she can escape her history or if she is destined to be immobilized by it forever. Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way explores layers of violence, the lost voices of women, post-colonial repercussions of that violence and the way it can grip generations. Will the secrets revealed alter the course of Claire's future, and can love exist in a place of pain Praise for Elaine Feeney 'AMAZING, EXCITING, VISCERAL' Marian Keyes 'BURSTING WITH TENDERNESS' Douglas Stuart 'RIVETING' Roddy Doyle 'HEART RENDING' Louise Kennedy 'UNFORGETTABLE' Sinead Gleeson 'BURSTING WITH SOUL' Lisa McInerney 'BEAUTIFULLY RENDERED AND IMAGINED' Anne Enright 'THRILLING' Nicole Flattery 'ABSORBING' Edel Coffey 'FABULOUS' Kevin Barry

Reviews

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way sees a woman return home to Ireland to care for her dying father. How she rebuilds her life, and the ways in which the past returns to haunt her, are conveyed with lyricism and longing. * Observer, *Books to Look Out For 2025* *
A superb, multi-generational story told in stunning, poetic prose. Elaine Feeney is one of Irish literature's most gifted and persuasive storytellers. -- Sinad Gleeson
I simply love Elaine Feeney's writing. Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way is proof, if any was needed, that she is one of the finest writers of her generation. This book moves effortlessly through humour, tragedy and devastation with great formal inventiveness. It is a brilliant exploration of how violence, oppression and hatred, both personal and political, can warp and overshadow a life. This is a hugely ambitious novel wrought with Feeneys trademark lyricism and emotional intelligence... Feeney will break your heart with her characters but she will also lovingly put it back together again. -- Edel Coffey
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is a startling and original novel loaded with insight on the long reach of traumas both personal and political. -- Sarah Gilmartin

Author Bio

Elaine Feeney is an acclaimed novelist and poet from the west of Ireland. Her debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and won the Kate O'Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. How to Build a Boat was also shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. Feeney has published the poetry collections Where's Katie, The Radio Was Gospel, Rise and All the Good Things You Deserve, and lectures at the National University of Ireland, Galway.