Author(s): Caoilinn Hughes

Novel | Ireland

The four Flattery sisters - Olwen, Nell, Maeve and Rhona - were left to cobble together their own makeshift adolescence after the death of both their parents.

Decades later, all four of them have found success in their respective fields, all of them boasting PhDs and, in Nell's case, a healthy clutch of Instagram followers. Still, none of the sisters have come to terms with their parents' deaths, choosing to focus instead on bigger problems - food insecurity, climate change, post-Brexit capitalism - to avoid confronting this trauma.

When Olwen disappears, Nell, Maeve and Rhona attempt to find the sister they no longer know, a woman who wants desperately not to be found. Their search will force the siblings to bridge the isolation that has grown between them, and face the past they thought they could bury.

Full of laugh-out loud wit and clear-eyed observations, The Alternatives is a story of sisterhood and belonging, of loss and connection, written with Caoilinn Hughes' trademark intelligence and razor-sharp prose.

”A brilliant, brainy book about the bravery of following one’s own path while also remembering the value of community.” —Guardian

Author Biography: Caoilinn Hughes is an Irish writer and poet whose second novel, The Wild Laughter (2020) won the Encore Award 2021, was longlisted for the 2021 Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize, and was shortlisted for several awards including the Dalkey Emerging Writer Literary Award. Her first novel, Orchid & the Wasp (2018), won the Collyer Bristow Prize 2019 and shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Awards and the Butler Literary Award. She holds a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and is currently the Oscar Wilde Centre Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.