Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

A poetic, funny, moving dissection of greed and the Irish family during the Celtic Tiger years. Thoroughly recommended for anyone who is a fan of Donal Ryan or Lisa McInerney.

Thank you to Netgalley, Oneworld Publications and Caoilinn Hughes for this e-copy in return for my honest review. While the premise of the book is dark, it is written with a tender hand and with a devilish wit. Stunning!

The tension and atmosphere in The Wild Laughter is really well built and executed. The book tells the tale of a pair of brothers who face an agonising decision to help their father for the last time as he suffers under the weight of Ireland's late 2000s financial crash. Narrated in a strong rural Irish voice with plenty of noir levity included, the story resonates as one which could be entirely true in the Ireland of that time. Great read.

The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes is a well-written novel about family dynamics, illness, euthanasia, bereavement. Dark but with a light touch.

The Wild Laughter has everything a great novel needs: memorable characters, high stakes drama, a distinctive voice, a very keen eye. Hughes’ energetic prose is delightfully astringent, a splash of cold water for your brain.

It’s the story of an Irish farming family during the Celtic Tiger years and the crash that followed, highlighting the high human cost of the economic downturn. A protracted illness, desperate measures, grief and guilt. The tangled, complex emotions of a family in extremis.

That sounds heavy, and it is, but not unremittingly so. Hughes manages it with a deftness of touch, with irony and spiky wit. The novel’s jabs of emotion are sharp and swift. It’s tempered with humour and arch turns of phrase, like the uncle with ‘a grin you might draw on a balloon’.

The final act moves from family drama to courtroom drama, as the consequences the family’s actions catch up with them. This section has less of the black humour and the tenderness—but does nicely skewer the chess game that is ‘justice’ via the court system.

There’s something mythic about this tragic story. The hallmarks of ancient and classical tales are here: warring brothers, the rise and fall of their house, the once-proud patriarch brought low. If you told me this was a retelling of some ancient legend or Greek tragedy, I would believe it. Tragicomic, moving and wise. 4 stars.

This book follows Hart and his family; his older golden boy brother Cormac, his ex-nun mother Nora, and his hardworking father Chief. They live on their farm in Roscommon and when the 2008 recession hits it has a particularly devastating effect on their family.

I know that I am in the minority, but this book just wasn't for me. I can't fault the writing, or even the story, it was just too miserable for me to able to enjoy it.

I would encourage everyone to read it and decide for themselves. If you are of the same opinion as me, the book is relatively short and you won't have wasted too much time. However, I do feel that based on the quality of the writing and the dry Irish humour that pops up in unexpected places, this book will appeal to a lot of people.

Thank you, #NetGalley and Oneworld Publications for the free copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Wild Laughter is a poetically written novel about an Irish family, struggling in the wake of the financial crash and end of the Celtic Tiger boom.

The characters are all beautifully drawn, flawed but comprehensible in their efforts to survive in the world. There are two twenty-something brothers - Cormac, ugly but favoured as the clever son and Hart, left behind to look after the farm, good-looking but oppressed by his brother. Hart is terrified of dogs and this sadly leads to some animal cruelty later in the novel. The parents are an odd couple - a formerly strong but now very ill potato farmer, The Chief, and failed nun and despised mother, Nóra.

I particularly enjoyed the advent of actress Dolly into the story. She is a vivacious character of great wit and dubious honesty, with a great turn of phrase.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

The synopsis for this book does not give much away but if we were to pull one phrase from there that describes the book incredibly well it would be "epic-in-miniature". The book stands at about 200 pages long but what it packs into those pages is a giant of a novel proving once more that good things (or in this case great things) do come in small packages.

The author takes a topic that is very close to the bone for many Irish people, the recession of 2008. It is something that has almost defined an entire generation, and left many people struggling. The book is about one such family and their struggle to deal with the financial crash, most notably the patriarch's struggle to deal with the result of a decision which went awry.

Our protagonist is Hart who struggles throughout with the idea that he should be the one to stay at home and help on the farm, despite the fact that it is clear to all in sundry that his brother would do a better job of it. Cormac apparently got the brains while Hart was left with the looks, his beauty is mentioned numerous times throughout. Hart's jealousy that Cormac got to leave and make a name for himself in "town" is strong theme throughout, and bubbles over into their search for love.

Hart's hopes and dreams seem to matter little as he wades through life trying to live up to family expectations, even if they are low. Hart's own personal issues are compounded by what is happening with his father, who is dying, leaving Hart with more ties to the homestead when all he really wants to do is run away.

The author has written a fantastic array of characters, and while Hart stands out as the protagonist, every other character is just as well described as he is. They all have their flaws, which are displayed openly, but it only makes them more human and more realistic. I think we will all be able to associate the characters with someone we know in real life.

The author's history in poetry shines through in the writing, which is excellent throughout. One of the reasons it took me a little longer to read this book was that I was hung up on some of the passages. I had to stop at various points just to savour what I had just read.

This is a that is at times very dark, the themes throughout mean it could hardly be a lighthearted novel, but there is plenty of humour to be found here too. The author has merged both the dark and the light into an incredible story. I have no doubt that this is a book that will be getting a massive amount of attention over the coming months, and I hope it starts more discussions over its central theme (which I won't spoil here). I loved it, and I recommend you pick it up, sooner rather than later.

My first introduction to Caoilinn Hughes’s writing and I absolutely loved the experience; in fact I ordered a copy of her debut novel before I’d even finished reading this!

The setting is rural Ireland in 2008, the country left financially devastated by the Celtic Tiger. Hart and his brother Cormac are struggling to come to terms with what this means for their future as a farming family, and on top of that their father’s health is worsening. I think this is best read knowing little more about the plot, but rest assured the story could not be more engaging and morally complex.

Hughes deftly handles this novel of family relations: the writing is fantastic, the story emotive and the dialogue and internal thoughts of the characters ring completely true. I can’t extol the virtues of this any more, and The Wild Laughter deserves to win all manner of prizes - it’ll definitely be on my personal list of top reads of 2020.

All the perks and perils of being a part of a family are unearthed within this darkly humorous and heartbreakingly poignant novel, played out against a back drop of a rural Ireland held fast within the grips of a massive recession. Hart might have been blessed with the looks in his family but he's always lived in the shadow of his older brother Cormac – bigger, tougher, and cunningly smarter. For Cormac, college and beyond; for Hart, unemployment disguised as helping out on the farm, a life he neither asked for nor desires. But Cormac is a bully and a thug, and it suits him to be the big man out and about while his younger brother takes care of the home front.


‘Beneath the surface of my brother’s glassy expression was a smirk like a large trout that might surface fleetingly for a hatch of mayflies. Even if it didn’t, you could tell it was there all along: a dark, slithering scorn, full of small bones that somebody, someday, would swallow.’


Hard hit by the recession and swindled in a property development wrought, the family is barely holding it together financially when Chief (the father of the story) is cut down with what is presumed to be cancer – he doesn’t go for tests or treatments, partly because he can't afford it (the money or the time away from the farm) and partly because there is little point: he's dying anyway, why pay someone to tell him and prolong it. Here we see the true measure of Hart versus Cormac: Cormac stays away, turning up just enough to bask under his mother's beam of adoration but not enough to actually contribute. Hart is there for everything: the work his father can't do, the cleaning up his mother won't do, and to witness the death of not just his father's body, but his dignity. Over and over we see the many ways in which this man was brought low by an illness he was never going to survive. Hart's love for his father was a beautiful but painful thing to regard.


‘The measure of love I had for him was not unlike the riz biscuits, in the awkward uncontainable way that made it wise to push the batch of it aside and start over for fear of being poisoned by too much swelling.’


I kept thinking that there was more to Nora, their mother, than what we were initially let in on. Depths that she perhaps was keeping contained, a painful past that had her stitched up. But in the end, I realised she was nothing more than who she was: a woman who would comfortably throw one son under the bus for the other if it meant for assurances of her own comfort and protection. If Hart was his father's son then Cormac was his mother's and this was evident over and above everything else. Nora’s strangeness wasn't a front for hidden depths, she was just a strange woman full stop. Just as Cormac was a tosser through and through.


‘Right from the outset, from his first interview he’d been building his case … and it wasn’t against the People. Maybe he took it for granted I’d do the same: set myself against him. How far back had he contrived my incrimination?’


Perhaps this withholding of motherly affection and lack of normal mother-son interactions could account for the way in which Hart related to women. He seemed to always be straddling a violent line. It wasn’t explored too deeply, but the hint of it was enough to ground Hart as a character, take him down a peg or two lest we all become too enamoured with him. Likewise, the whole dog thing; the author was again reinforcing the flawed part of Hart’s character, giving us a reason to be repelled by him. And yet, in a way that only the best authors can achieve, these flaws only make you care for Hart more deeply by the end: the betrayed brother, the son cast out; the one to take the fall and bear the burden of his father's choice because he was the only one pure enough, good enough, to do so.


‘Father Shaughnessy agreed that honesty was my biggest strength and my weakness. Too much honesty is incompatible with this world. It is water poured onto droughted soil. It can only spill off. The earth is too rigid in its poverty to absorb what wealth is given.’


For me, reading this novel was akin to watching waves breaking on the shore, the momentum building as you wade deeper, knowing that you will be in for a drenching but the shock of that final wave, once it at last hits, still managing to leave you shredded to pieces, despite all the warning signs guiding you to the finish.



Thanks is extended to Oneworld Publications for providing me with a NetGalley copy of The Wild Laughter for review.

It's a shame that the description on the cover is so vague and doesn't really tell what the book is about, because I probably wouldn't have read it if I hadn't heard really good things about it and for it being written by a young female writer from Ireland.
This book is excellent! The style is beautiful and original, and the cover looks so nice.

Thank you One World and Netgalley for the ARC

The Wild Laughter is Caoilinn Hughes's follow up to The Orchid and the Wasp which was, for my money, the most complex and beguiling Celtic Tiger novel. This one is a big contrast - where The Orchid and The Wasp was a colourful novel about hope and good fortune set in Dublin and New York, The Wild Laughter is a dowdy novel set in dowdy County Roscommon. Is it just coincidence that this was John McGahern's setting for his loosely autobiographical The Barracks?

We have a village. We have a farm. We have Doharty (Hart) Black about to inherit the farm from his mother Nora and his terminally ill father Manus, known affectionately as The Chief. Hart feels stuck. He has no great interest in farming and is envious of his brother Cormac who has escaped to town and gets to hang out with the arty crowd. Hart apparently got the looks and Cormac got the brains - and he doesn't think this was a fair trade.

The farm is not healthy. It wasn't ever quite clear, but it seems the family made some poor investments that were wiped out when the Celtic Tiger collapsed. There's a sense that the Blacks are collateral damage while they imagine the financiers and dealmakers have survived. This feels like a significant evolution from the pastoral feel of McGahern's novels. But how far is this really new? Couldn't a parallel be made to the devastating impact of An Gorta Mor, driving tenant farmers broke while the landlords seemed to have got away unscathed? Couldn't Cormac be seen as an emigrant, fleeing the land for the prospect of a brighter life?

But having set up the novel to be one thing, its focus seems to slide. First of all, we have a story of sibling rivalry over women. And then we have a story about assisted dying complete with a courtroom potboiler. The pace changes wildly between these different focuses - towards the end each successive chapter could almost have come from a different novel. It is unconventional, it's a bit distracting, but it also lifts this above a McGahern wannabe.

Caoilinn Hughes can certainly write - probably in two languages. There were plenty of phrases as Gaeilge that were not translated into English. I got some of them from my basic knowledge of Scottish Gaidhlig, but a lot of it went over my head. I suspect the novel is highly referential on an academic level (characters' names, for example, are not chosen at random; a couple are spelled out but the others have meanings too). Sometimes, though, a novel can be too clever. The Achilles Heel in The Wild Laughter is that the crucial plot developments are written in such an oblique way that it is hard to be sure exactly what has happened. By all means invite readers to read between clever lines for small points of detail, but when the main thrust of the story is dissipated in this way it can be so frustrating.

Overall, there's enough in The Wild Laughter to be readable, thought provoking and occasionally fun. The narrative angle is quirky and scenes of farmyard raids (links to Ribbonism?) are fun. But a more consistent narrative drive and clearer language in parts could have made this truly great.

The Wild Laughter is brilliantly, achingly, infuriatingly superb, and that’s way too many adverbs, but unavoidable  in this case. Set in Roscommon, Ireland, during the dying days of the Celtic Tiger and the subsequent dramatic monetary reversal from 2008 on, it bears witness to the wasting away of the boom years due to uncontrollable excess.
It’s a devastating tale of what Ireland was trying to become and the how and the why of of the failure, mirrored in the fate of a family destroyed by the crisis. Hughes’ prose is gritty( “…sticking Shane’s head into the hollowed out innards of a wild goat and holding him in till he gagged”), colloquial, needing a re-read at times and poignant (“..left us standing in the puddles of our own shadows).
He characters are rich, real and identifiable. Cormac the thinker, the smart one, the privileged son who forsakes the family for his own future; and Doharty (Hart) the younger son, sacrificing, but with the looks to take him places if only he discovers where. Patriarch, ‘The Chief’, squanders the windfall of the boom on dodgy real estate deals in Eastern Europe and the ever tolerant mother, Nora, struggling to hold it all together, (“…the purse strings had to make do as shoelaces and the hysterectomy tied its knot in Nora’s psyche..”).
If you only read one book this year that leaves you grinding your teeth at the frustration of it, make this the one.
Thank You to Oneworld Publications and NetGalley.

Caolinn Hughes is an award winning poet, novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel “The Orchid and the Wasp” showed her talent and featured in Gael Foess a remarkable protagonist and a fascinating interaction with her brother Guthrie. In my review of that book I described Gael as “a self-willed force of nature, someone who does not so much break the rules as simply and casually change the rules to suit her and her ends and whose sheer self-believe enables her to deceive those around her who she views simply as means to those end” whereas Guthrie is a rather other worldly character. That book ranges across 2002-2011 and takes particular shape when Gael’s banker father walks out on the family in the 2008 crash.

In an interview around her debut novel, the author commented on Gael’s motivations "The fall of the Celtic Tiger was interesting for the way that this character understands how the world works. Because there was an onus taken on by Irish people, after the crash, and there was very much a sense of cultural acknowledgement of our own involvement and complicity. You know, "I should have known not to re-mortgage my house to buy that other property". This thing that, yes, the banks were to blame because they facilitated it, but we should've learnt where we came from. We should've learnt humility. We should've remembered how Ireland was 50, 70 years ago. And everyone, I think, was working through this on a spiritual level. That's what I think was unique with Ireland at that time.

And in a separate interview commented “Then at the end, it’s post-crash. I remember hearing people talking about getting a tombstone, and they’d been offered one that had the stonecutter’s email address on it for a big discount. That kind of negotiation hadn’t been going on. Nobody would have been spending their emotional energy on the mortification of having someone’s email address on their husband’s tombstone. That was heartbreaking, to see the embarrassment”.

This book I think draws very much on the same ideas – it is set around the same period, features two very different siblings, it has the exit of a father; it even has the stonecutter anecdote mentioned in the interview: but is I think more focused than its predecessor, which like many debut novels was a little too wide-ranging in plot.

The book is narrated by Hart Black, son of an Irish farmer (who he refers to as the Chief). Hart’s brother is Cormac and (in simple terms) Hart got the looks (and girls) and Cormac the brains (and sporting ability). The result is that while Cormac goes off to get an engineering degree, Hart naturally is left behind to work on the family farm.

Cormac’s intelligence leads him to sniff out opportunities for his hitherto cautious Father to sow into the Celtic Tiger boom; only to reap the bitter harvest of his over-leveraged position after the crash:

But what did I know about economics? Only that it’s a creed we’re all baptised into against our will, and our heads can be pushed back underwater and held there if ever the fealty wavers.

Something which (in a set piece scene I know many readers won’t like) leads Cormac and Hart into a rare co-operation on enacting a brutal revenge on a sheep farmer who lured the Chief into some ill-advised European property investments (Cormac’s own role seemingly overlooked).

In many ways Cormac is more like Gael (scheming and not always successfully) and Hart like Guthrie (more thoughtful) – their tensions coming out in their relationships with an actress Dolly.

The main part of the plot which is revealed from the first chapter is The Chief’s terminal illness and the decision of his family (Cormac, Hart and their mother Nora) to assist him in suicide – a decision which (via the intervention of the local priest) leads to them being out on trial, a trial which dominates the second half of the book and which also exposes the family dynamics.

I think the author’s strengths in other literary forms comes through strongly here, in snappy dialogue and descriptions

But overall this books works best as a black comedy – a comedy which examines the guilt of a nation at its own complicity in the downfall engineered on it by global finance. A guilt which is inevitably influenced by societal Catholicism and a complicity which has to be seen in the context of many years of occupation and repression. And all of this filtered through the lens of a family’s complicity in their own grief.

An excellent second novel.

This is a pared-back powerhouse of a novel, fitting a vast amount of humanity, poignancy and the darkest of dark humour into its 200 or so pages.

The outer focus is on the story of young rural Irishman Hart Black and his relationship with his family, in particular his father who is a kind and loving man beaten down by illness and circumstance.

But really this story is about so much more: love, faith, family and how humanity and compassion can persevere against the combined challenges of illness, family circumstances and the wider economic crisis.

The writing is beautiful and poetic, with characters who are real, flawed and sympathetic. Some wonderful similes and descriptions: 'the chin was going like a pokie machine handle'; 'he wore a grin you might draw on a balloon'; 'her face was set with fault lines whose activity you might spend your whole life failing to predict'.

This passage for me sums up the extraordinary combination of beautiful lyrical descriptiveness and hopeless desperation that is evidenced throughout the book: "The waves pushed in a lip of scum for a reminder of the great chilling world that's in it, full of razor clams and spiral conches people take home and hold up to their ears to remember their holidays, but all they hear are the hollow qualities of their domestic, logistical lives"

I can't wait to read more from Caoilinn Hughes.

What to say about this brilliant gut punch of a novel?

The Wild Laughter is a 200-page novel with the depth of a veritable tome. It moves assuredly and precisely, taking you further into the family dynamics of the Black family and the financial and physical decline of its patriarch. What strikes me most about this novel is how compassionately it treats its characters. They are all deeply flawed, at times seeming to be beyond redemption, but there is always a little detail that Hughes introduces that forces you to recalibrate, reevaluate who you had perhaps pegged them as. And as much as you get to intimately know these characters, especially the narrator, Hart, they are also characters who aren't fully knowable. There are questions about them that remain unanswered, even by the end of the novel.

What makes all the above possible is Hughes's brilliant writing; it immediately lays the ground onto which this novel so confidently steps from page one.

The only thing that marred this otherwise impressive novel is its protagonist's treatment of women. It went beyond casual sexism and objectification and into potentially more violent territory sometimes, and it bothered me. I didn't get why it was there, and why it was never addressed.

I had the absolute pleasure of hearing Caoilinn read a chapter from this beautiful book at The ROSBC Christmas Party and I was immediately captivated. She has a stunning way with words that whisks you away and firmly into whatever story she weaves.
Full rtc closer to publication date.

I was a huge fan of Caoilinn Hughes’ first novel, The Orchid and the Wasp, last year so was excited to see what she tackled next. Very different subject matter here, but her sublime writing and creation of fully rounded, warts-and-all, memorable characters are undiminished. This is a devastating story of a farming family in crisis, the father over-extending and then losing everything in the financial crash in Ireland, then brought to breaking point through illness and despair. We see two brothers engaged in a life-long duel (an unforgivable simplification, but one is a brash, go-getting type, absenting himself when the going gets tough, the other the dutiful son who hangs in there) and their responses to their parents’ dilemma. A sad, sad story of love, responsibility, and faith tested to the extreme, it is intense and completely immersive for the reader. Fabulous writing, I could quote a brilliant turn of phrase from every page and all of Dolly’s wonderful letters, but a couple of examples that stood out for me:

‘That’s what I saw I the mirror. My impotent, hairless, slackened, orphan self. The mirror was the way of my recalibration. It was wojous as an AA shindig or an AA bra tag on the unpinging.’

‘Just then, Shane tried to slink in rat-like at the back, but all the faces staring doorward made a hedgehog of him.’

A terrific read, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.