Confessions (2025)
Why this one?
This is an upcoming release that caught my attention. A family saga of sorts with an interesting setting, a nice cover and some reassuring author endorsements (including from Yael van der Wouden).
Catherine Airey is a debut novelist, whose first book generated something of a wild bidding war. She grew up in England to a family of mixed English and Irish heritage, studied English at Cambridge and worked for a while in rights at Penguin Random House, and now lives in County Cork (Ireland). She moved over there in 2021, when the pandemic acted as a motivation for her to uproot from London and her Civil Service copywriting job, and start writing fiction.
Confessions will be published by Viking in January 2025. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
Confessions is set across several decades of recent history, in sections split between New York City and rural Donegal, Ireland. It is told from multiple perspectives, of women in different generations of the same family. It opens memorably on September 11, 2001, with Cora Brady wandering the streets of New York following the attacks, in which it rapidly becomes apparent that her father has died. In an absence of any other surviving family members, we learn that she is to move to Donegal to stay with her aunt Róisín. And that’s the last we hear from Cora for a while, as we first jump back and later forward in time to learn about the stories of her mother, aunt, and later her daughter.
The next section is one of the book’s strongest, focusing on Cora’s mother Máire, who moves to New York in the 1980s, to study. A promising artist, she is disillusioned when her course turns out to be purely History of Art, and following a harrowing incident with the father of a friend, is taken under the wing of a somewhat shady professor who helps her move to an art college. At the same time, though, she is spiralling into a cycle of depression and drugs and isolating herself from old friends and family. Back in Ireland, her sister Róisín is very much the ‘left behind’ family member. She obsesses over Michael, an old family friend whose interest was really in Máire, and with a local building inhabited by an art group known as The Screamers. She’s a character with less direction, although that seems set to change when she forms a friendship and later a relationship with a quirky woman called Scarlett, whose ‘Victorian school’ business is a front for something very much illegal in the Ireland of the time. The book’s later sections are mainly told from the present-day perspective of Cora’s daughter Lyca, who is slowly uncovering the many secrets of the previous generations of her family. A trip to New York with her mother concludes the book, and wraps up some earlier threads.
I enjoyed this rather a lot as a series of really well-executed character studies. The section focusing on Máire is really immersive and powerful, and all the more so when we later learn her eventual fate. The relationships between the characters are also really compelling - aside from the central dynamic between the two sisters (which is largely a dynamic of silence, so interesting in how that plays out) there are little sub-stories that add sparks of interest throughout the book - notably Róisín / Scarlett and the childhood friendship / infatuation dynamic of Lyca and Sanjeet. It’s also a book with a really great sense of place - particularly in the New York sections, where the city very much feels like an additional character.
The same could also be said of the house that is the temporary home of the ‘Screamers’ and later becomes the family home of Lyca, Cora, and ‘Gaga’. It’s certainly an ominous and intriguing presence throughout the book, and its presence adds a note of pleasing strangeness to what might otherwise have been more ‘ordinary’ sections set in Ireland. I did feel, though, that the whole subplot around the Screamers, and the ‘Scream School’ text-based early video game written by one of the characters (it turns out), extracts from which punctuate the novel, felt a little too try-hard in terms of adding some sort of deeper connecting significance between the sections that didn’t quite hang together for me. I found myself seeing these bits as barriers in the way of the far more compelling character-led storytelling that makes up the bulk of the book.
There’s really a huge amount of quality in this, for a debut novel especially. It’s achingly close to being something I would unequivocally love and shout loudly about to anyone listening, but a couple of flaws I think expose it as a debut and not quite the full finished article. In addition to the above, it’s really the book’s conclusion that let it down for me. It’s too contrived, too unlikely a coincidence, and too neatly rounded off (where if left as only a hint it might have just about worked). For me this book has an essential beautiful messiness at it’s heart, and it’s the attempts to tidy up around the edges and give it structure and coherence that don’t quite work. Some things are better left messy.
Score
8
A really intriguing and in places stunning debut, which deserves (and I think will get) a wide audience. It’s not without its flaws but it’s absolutely worth checking out.
Next up
Catching up on a bit of my TBR pile between major prizes. Next up I think a bit more Rachel Kushner, having lapped up the daftness of the Booker shortlisted Creation Lake.
