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Overview: Mary Costello grew up in Galway and now lives in Dublin. Her collection of stories, The China Factory, was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. Her first novel, Academy Street, was named Book of the Year and Eason Novel of the Year by the 2014 Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award.
Genre: Fiction > General/Classics
Academy Street (2014)
A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman’s life, from an important new writer
Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely—a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with.
Academy Street is Mary Costello’s luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving re-encounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City.
Anne Enright has said that Costello’s first collection of stories, The China Factory, "has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right . . . Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand" (The Guardian).
Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life.
The China Factory (2012)
A collection of twelve exquisite stories that explore how ordinary men and women endure the trials and complexities of life and the ripples of disquiet that lie beneath the surface.
An elderly schoolteacher recalls the single act of youthful passion that changed her life forever; a young gardener has an unsettling encounter with a suburban housewife; a wife who miscalculated the guarantees of marriage embarks upon an online affair. And in the title story a teenage girl strikes up an unlikely friendship with a lonely bachelor.
Love, loss, betrayal. Grief, guilt, longing. The act of grace or forgiveness that can suddenly transform and redeem lives. In these twelve haunting stories Mary Costello examines the passions and perils of everyday life and relationships and, with startling insight, casts a light on the darkest corners of the human heart.
With a calm intensity and an undertow of sadness, she reveals the secret fears and yearnings of her characters, and those isolated moments when a few words or a small deed can change everything, with stark and sometimes brutal consequences.
Barcelona (2024)
A captivating short story collection from award-winning novelist Mary Costello exploring love, loss and the turbulent lives of ordinary people
In Barcelona, we meet a cast of characters who live turbulent inner lives. In a Spanish hotel room a marriage unravels as a young wife is haunted by a past love. A father travels to Paris to meet his scientist son and is exposed to his son’s true nature. A woman attends a reading by a famous author and comes to some painful realisations about her own marriage.
The stories in Barcelona reveal the underlying disquiet of modern life and the sometimes brutal nature of humanity. Whether on city streets, long car journeys or in suburban rooms, we glimpse characters as they approach those moments of desperation – or revelation – that change or reshape fate.
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