EBOOK
About
A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer
Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely-a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with.
Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City.
Anne Enright has said that Costello's first collection of stories, The China Factory, "has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right ... Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand" (The Guardian).
Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life.
Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely-a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with.
Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City.
Anne Enright has said that Costello's first collection of stories, The China Factory, "has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right ... Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand" (The Guardian).
Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"Darkly beautiful . . . the opening pages . . . recall in their capturing of a young person's drifting impressions Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . Costello renders her homely, knowing heroine with craft and compassion in this sad, slim, rich novel."
Kirkus (starred review)
"In Academy Street, [Mary Costello] has hammered her writing--deceptively strong, tonally flat--into a dark, strong book. To call it restrained is to understate both the turbulence buried within the novel and the control with which it's conveyed . . . The handling of time is fluid and cumulatively devastating."
Ronnie Scott, The Australian
"Costello's writing is so controlled and convincing. She captures with great acuity the complex inner world that makes Tess both withdrawn and desperate to experience life . . . Hers is a quiet life, but one with enormous impact on the reader."
Sinéad Gleeson, The Guardian