In Alice Lyons’ implosive first novel, Oona, child of first generation immigrants, lives in an affluent New Jersey suburb where conspicuous consumption and white privilege prevail. A silence surrounding death extends to the family home where Oona’s mother lies dying of cancer. As her inner life goes into shutdown, Oona has her first encounters with sex, drugs and other adolescent rites of passage. What does a voice alienated from itself sound like? How can the creative process be truthfully represented? In this remarkable debut, a female character’s fraught journey into adulthood is rendered in vivid color. Oona, the emergent artist, encounters the physical world and the materials of her craft, engaging with her losses through Ireland’s culture and landscape. As boom turns to bust, Oona’s story, articulated without the letter ‘o’, inhabits a world of fracture and false promise, conveyed by elision yet miraculously made whole and real in the telling.

Alice Lyons is a writer whose work embraces the visual arts. She is a recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry (2002) and the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary awarded by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (2004). Her poetry film, The Polish Language, co-directed with Orla Mc Hardy, was nominated for an Irish Film and Television Award (IFTA, 2010). Originally from the USA, where she was Radcliffe Fellow in Poetry and New Media at Harvard University 2015/16, she has lived in the west of Ireland for over twenty years. She lectures in writing and literature at the Yeats Academy of Art, Design & Architecture, IT Sligo.