A superb, multi-generational story told in stunning, poetic prose. Elaine Feeney is one of Irish literature's most gifted and persuasive storytellers.
Sinéad Gleeson In Let Me Go Mad in my Own Way Elaine Feeney reaches from a stagnant present to a troubled past, with an uncanny understanding of the workings of the human heart. I loved this book.
Louise Kennedy This book touched my soul. It tells the story of a woman searching for home, and healing. It moves between the past and the present, highlighting the dark histories of rural Ireland, and its men. A perfect depiction of the complicated relationships we have with ourselves and our histories.
Katriona O'Sullivan This novel lulls the reader with its lyrical beauty, then slowly devastates with its raw passion and pain. Feeney shows how the political is always personal, and how the legacy of violence and trauma continues to wreak havoc on people's lives. Shocking, intelligent and full of humanity, this is a story for our times.
Mary Costello This is a clear-eyed and deep-hearted calibration of accumulating trauma, which Feeney skillfully conveys the scope and heft of while considering what it might take to halt it in its devastating tracks. She has the novelist's instinct of wanting to get to the bottom of painful situations, yet she is also a first-class poet who knows that painful situations are often fathomless and ineffable. What we get then is a driven, tenacious, and probing narrative, made up of deeply expressive sentences that bristle and ache. Curious, sensitive, and unfeignedly visceral, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way packs an intellectual and emotional punch as it asks that most difficult of questions – What now?
Claire-Louise Bennett 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 Feeney’s 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 Much will be said about Feeney's warmth, compassion and bravery on the page, but even beyond such achievements, her writing is so natural, so apparently effortless, that it seems at times miraculous.
Lisa McInerney An astonishing achievement - a book that illuminates in a wholly fresh and innovative manner how echoes of violence echo down the family line, shifting realities in the present tense. A book about how women hold power and space within cruelly Byzantine patriarchal structures, and how the truths passed down by women from generation to generation create a shadow history that stands as a corrective to received narratives. It's also a vivid, witty and moving read told in Feeney's inimitable style, with an ensemble of unforgettable characters at its heart.
Jessica Traynor Threads together small everyday truths with vast, overarching, horrifying, revelatory ones – property, work, what writing is for, homes and their ghosts, what it means to be part of a nation reborn from violence that is never really far away… Reading it feels at once like a beautiful digressive trip through modern life, and a far-wider-reaching, wildly ambitious vision of what it means to be Irish and a person right now.
Roisin Kiberd 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