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Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way: The new novel by the Booker-Prize Longlisted author of How To Build a Boat
Elaine Feeney
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Description for Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way: The new novel by the Booker-Prize Longlisted author of How To Build a Boat
paperback.
**A 2025 LOOK-HEAD SELECTION IN THE OBSERVER, THE IRISH TIMES, JOURNAL.IE, RTE GUIDE AND SUNDAY TIMES IRELAND**
A multi-generational family story of the west of Ireland and its women and a love story of second chances from the Booker-longlisted author of How to Build a Boat
'Elaine Feeney is one of Irish literature's most gifted and persuasive storytellers' SINÉAD GLEESON
'An uncanny understanding of the workings of the human heart. I loved this book' LOUISE KENNEDY
'Full of humanity, a story for our times' MARY COSTELLO
Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she ... Read morebroke up with Tom Morton and moved from cosmopolitan London back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. But snatches of her old life are sure to follow her, when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby for work. As Claire is thrown back into a love she thought she’d left behind, she questions if Tom has come for her or for himself.
Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While Claire tries to maintain a normal life – obsessing over the internet, going to work and minding her own business – Tom’s return stirs up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house.
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is a story of love and resilience, rich with history and drama, and the legacies of violence and redemption. As the secrets of the past are revealed, Claire must confront whether she can escape her history to make her own future – and whether finding herself means facing herself too.
'Clear-eyed and deep-hearted... packs an intellectual and emotional punch' CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT
'This book touched my soul' KATRIONA O'SULLIVAN
'Feeney will break your heart with her characters but she will also lovingly put it back together again' EDEL COFFEY
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Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Will be shipped on or around publication date
About Elaine Feeney
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 ... Read moreNovel 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 University of Galway. Show Less
Reviews for Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way: The new novel by the Booker-Prize Longlisted author of How To Build a Boat
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.
... Read moreLouise 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.
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