Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

Feeney (How to Build a Boat) explores an Irish family’s trauma in this contemplative outing. On the heels of the sudden death of her mother and the rapid decline of her terminally ill father, Claire O’Connor leaves her longtime English boyfriend, Tom, in London, and returns to her family’s isolated farmhouse outside Galway. Her reappearance after a decade coincides with the Covid-19 lockdown, and despite her past assertions that she’s “done with this place,” Claire, a writer and teacher, throws herself headlong into homemaking after her father’s death, egged on by her compulsive watching of tradwife social media reels and accelerated by Tom’s decision to rent a house nearby. Alongside the present-day narrative, Feeney unfurls the story of Claire’s great-grandmother, who runs guns out of the house for the IRA in 1920, and 11-year-old Claire, who’s enlisted there by her father in 1990 to help finalize the sale of a mare to be bred for the English royal family. With arresting imagery and skillful shifts in perspective, Feeney weaves together these narrative threads to gut-wrenching effect, as when Claire’s father “seemed to remember the atmosphere” of a horrific event from before he was born, and the novel culminates in an avalanche of savage scenes and revelations. It’s a potent drama of a family shaped by a nation in upheaval. (Oct.)