Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

An Observer, Irish Times, and Sunday Times Ireland Preview Selection

The Booker-nominated author of How to Build a Boat returns to western Ireland with a multi-generational family story about grief, inheritance, and learning to live with the past–and with yourself.

Claire O’Connor is a promising writer who left the family’s struggling farmstead in western Ireland for London, swearing never to return. But after the unexpected death of her mother, she is racked with grief, and when her father is diagnosed with cancer, she decides to return home to care for him, destroying everything she’d so carefully built up in the process. The pandemic follows, and Claire falls into a comfortable routine, one increasingly shaped by a growing obsession: the lives of the 20-something trad wives she discovers on social media. When Tom, her lost London love, unexpectedly shows up the next town over, her anxieties and obsessions collide, the resulting conflict forcing Claire and her brothers to finally deal with their family’s historic trauma–a trauma whose evidence is carved into the beams of the family home and the stone floors upon which their ancestors bled.

Ranging through recent Irish history, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is Elaine Feeney’s most ambitious novel to date, a work of literary and cultural exorcism and a profound exploration of family, history, violence, and hope.