The April Fiction Book Group will be meeting via Zoom
Monday, April 13th • 6:30 PM ET / 11:30 PM IST via Zoom
Session open to all, no registration required.
Click on this link to join the Zoom session
Find out about Solas Nua's Fiction Book Group and titles list
Join the Book Group's Facebook Group here!
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney
• Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year
• An RTÉ Best Irish Book of 2025
• An Observer, Irish Times, and Sunday Times Ireland Preview Selection
• A Globe and Mail Fall Book of 2025
• A Globe 100 Best Book of 2025
“In Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, [Feeney] tells the story of Claire O’Connor, a woman who moves from London back home to Ireland, outside Galway, to deal with the death of her mother. Tom, her former boyfriend in England, suddenly moves in nearby, a development that Claire says ‘felt like a trespass.’ But this setup of domestic suspense is just the foundation on which Feeney builds a sprawling family tale that spans a century of Irish history.”
—Washington Post
“A masterclass in Irish storytelling . . . What makes Feeney’s characterisation so refreshing is that she doesn’t expect her reader to like—much less root for—her protagonist; preferring instead to insinuate self-examination from her audience.”
—James Patterson, RTÉ
“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, author of Trespasses
“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 . . . 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, author of Pond
"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, author of Hagstone
About the Book
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.
About the Author
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 Novel 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.
All events are listed in Eastern Time and Irish Standard Time.
