I do wish people would read Irish authors other than Sally Rooney. I rated this much more than any of her books. Such a GOOD book about sisterhood with a rollicking cast of characters. I’d describe it as like Bad Sisters without the murderous plots and with a lot more rocks.

A complex character and relationships focused story. It felt like the sisters were real, as they learned about themselves after coming back together for the first time in 20 years to find their sister.
Understood how she could walk away from everything, after taking responsibilities for the family when she was only 17 and her own family.
Part two felt like a script ready for the screen?

This book. This magnificent book.

The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes is the story of the Flattery sisters, who were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances.

Various relatives moved in and out, looking after them in shifts. This angered and confused the girls, who resisted management, who preferred unsupervised sadness.

The eldest, Olwen, takes over, doing her best to guide the younger three, but ultimately they all find their own way forward and when the novel opens, the sisters are in their thirties and excelling in their chosen careers.

Scatter-brained Olwen is a geology professor in Galway, preoccupied with climate change; Rhona, focused and ruthless, is a political commentator, and teaches political science at Trinity in Dublin, all with her one-year-old son, Leo, tucked under her arm; gentle and creative Maeve is a chef, who found success via social media, and is now stuck catering ritzy dinner parties in London’s Notting Hill; and Nell is a philosophy professor in America, who would be on track for tenure if she was more ‘…into playing the game, into academic-capitalist compliance‘.

“I have three sisters. They all have PhDs. Olwen says its Bayesian statistics, is all.” Mrs Charles is incredulous. Four Irish sisters…all with PhDs? “And none with husbands!” Maeve says this tongue-in-cheek but immediately regrets it. It is both too rude a parody of Mrs Charles’s intonation and ambitions for women other than herself…and a nauseating, friendly-rapscallion bit of self-sacrifice that will only intensify Mrs Charles’s endearment towards the heretical Irish.

The sisters lead disparate lives and contact between them is sporadic, until Olwen ‘vanishes’. The sisters descend on the Irish countryside in search of her (this is not a mystery novel, and it’s not a spoiler to reveal that they find her early in the story). Their time together forces them to face both their past and the uncertain future.

I loved everything about this book but those kind of statements aren’t helpful to other readers, so I’ll try to be a little more discerning.

First and foremost, the dry humour (and the humour is ultimately what made me cry in one of the closing scenes). It’s difficult to quote funny bits because Hughes has created each character with such care and attention to detail, that what they do and say is intrinsically funny. I do not underestimate the skill that it takes to create characters that you feel you know.

I’ve never heard the word vegan uttered from anywhere other than a high horse.

Secondly, Hughes has delivered a novel about climate change, without actually saying ‘climate change’. Olwen talks about it in the context of Earth’s long history (and how in the past few decades, we’ve accelerated destruction); Rhona treats it as a political issue (and meanwhile is ensuring that a seawall protecting her coastal home gets paid for by the local government); Maeve’s agenda is sustainability and food security; and Nell encourages existential debate among her students. This varied approach allows readers to find their own point of connection. Olwen to her students –

Europe’s endemic forests took millennia to flourish. In five thousand years, we’ve destroyed ninety-nine percent of them. In Ireland, we want the full hundred. And Soil! Ye know soil? That’s been around for a while. Until we discovered the burger. We ruin a lot of soil to grow a burger. If we keep up our hijinks, we have fifty years of farming left.
[…] We’re Stone Age people still. We only have tooth-whitening kits and Duolingo to mark us out as modern.

Lastly, the structure of this book – it’s genius. It begins by shifting perspectives between each of the sisters. When they come together, it is written as a play (acts, scenes, dialogue and actions). The change in pace and energy is obvious but what is really clever is that by the time the sisters meet, you’re anticipating what they’ll be like in each other’s company.

The structure also allows for quiet, reflective moments – there’s silences and space. I’m not quite sure how Hughes achieved this, and as I write it doesn’t make much sense, but in the same way that I anticipated the interactions of sisters, I also felt the silences, the moments where they would look at each other before speaking, or sense the heaviness of a sigh or a shoulder slump. None of this stuff is written but it is there because the characters have been meticulously crafted.

And an extra special mention for Leo, who doesn’t say anything but is a master of silences, facial expressions, and timing.

When she turns, her gaze goes straight to Leo. He was barely three months old when she last saw him; now he’s nearly one. He discerns that his role is to be quietly magnificent.

When I saw Hughes speak a few weeks ago, she said that this is a book about care. And again, she explores this theme differently through each character – Nell delves into Heidegger’s concept of care; Maeve cooks; Rhona musters resources. And Olwen is pure-Olwen, bringing her big-sister-energy to everything.

Our father cared profusely…but you can be shit at caring.

It’s rare that I finish a book and immediately want to turn to the first page again, but this is one of those books.

I received my copy of The Alternatives from the publisher, Oneworld Publications, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

5/5

I loved it but i'm still grokking because I want to write something meaningful. An excellent, multilayered story full of humor
A more extensive review will follow
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Rating: 3/5 stars

The Alternatives is perfectly described by another Goodreads reviewer as “Contemporary Little Women, but they are all depressed. I really wanted to love this family saga of four sisters, not quite estranged but getting close, attempting to reconnect… Unfortunately, for each great idea or brilliant line, there was at least one equally clumsy bit. Eventually, I had to push myself to finish the novel, despite my best efforts.

The Story:
The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill, until one day their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home. Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found.

What I liked:
The backflap describes this as “a book of ideas”, and rightly so. Caoilinn Hughes clearly planned, plotted and thought out this novel exquisitely from beginning to end. Through these individual characters, she tackles large societal topics (ranging from politics, health-care and wealth-disparity to climate change) and communicates a clear opinion on them. Whether this is a positive or negative for you as a reader will largely depend on if you agree with her statements, but the messages she aims to deliver is received loud and clear.
It makes for an incredibly layered reading experience, where each characters is representative of a larger thing. This stuff is my personal catnip, so for the first 1/3 I was eager to find out where the author would take each of these characters, and how they would all collide once reunited.

What I didn’t like:
Unfortunately, this is where the story began to lose me a bit. It’s only about 40% of the way through that we actually see the sisters interact for the first time with each other. In my opinion, that was too late, and let to the pacing feeling a bit off-balance.
Additionally, for a story so focused on a small cast of characters, I was surprised by how uninvested and disconnected I felt from all of them by the end of their chapters. Perhaps that was mostly because the characters never felt like people to me, but rather “vessels” for the author to communicate the aforementioned messages through. There are multiple occasions where they are metaphors instead of people; to varying degrees of success.
The metaphors and analogies are countless and range from creative to heavy-handed to far-fetched. Whenever it fell in the latter category, things could get really grating…
There is a point where too much is packed into one single novel... A point where a story becomes so oversaturated with themes that it becomes a manifesto rather than a story. A point where the width of the scope comes at the cost of the depth of the characters and the impact they make.
The Alternatives never fully reaches that point, but teeters so close to it, that it shoots itself in the foot.

Overall, this is a novel that I loved on paper, but struggled to connect with in practice. You mileage may vary. I can see this book being nominated for a bunch of prizes, and detested by readers as a “pretentious slog” in equal parts. Both opinions are valid. I sit somewhere in the middle…

Many thanks to Oneworld Publications for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed this story of four Irish sisters, all highly accomplished in their fields. Each sister is living her own distinct life and has responded differently to their parents' early death. One sister then goes missing into the Irish countryside and the other three rally together to find her and rescue her if they can.

An engaging story which will appeal to a wide range of readers.

The Alternatives is very much a book of two halves; the first half, which introduces us to the four sisters - Olwen, Rhona, Maeve and Nell - I found somewhat slow going. The second half, where the younger three converge on Ireland in search of Olwen, who has disappeared, felt much more assured and I enjoyed it enormously (if one can be said to enjoy a book that deals with the collapse of civilisation as we know it). And reading the book in the week that climate scientists expressed dismay and terror about seemingly-inevitable 3c warming made Olwen's fears feel more than a bit prescient.

This just did not work for me. We start with different chapters following each sister separately - there are four of them. The issue with this, inevitably, is that you end up not being too interested in some of the characters and these chapters felt a bit like a drag.
I was not particularly interested in the story although I liked that a lot of it took place in the West of Ireland, and I disliked the writing. There is a long section - maybe a third of it - written like a play, which I was not expecting and found out of place within the context of the plot. The writing irritated me too - "Rhona's car is murderously clean and acquittingly silent", etc.
Overall, that book just was not for me and I struggled to finish it.

I think this one was more of a me issue than the book itself, as an only child I found the relatability and the relationship between the sisters a little hard to believe / comprehend. At part the writing was so solidly dialogue that I thought it would really lend itself to an audiobook / the stage where the speed would feel more natural rather than pages and pages of dialogue in a novel which feels somewhat stilted.

The characterisation of the sisters and their specialty fields was well developed and you could tell that Hughes really 'knew' her characters which I appreciated. I think this would be a good one if you have siblings and can relate a little better or even better, if you can listen on audiobook.

I really enjoyed what I was able to read of this, but sadly ran out of time to finish it before it was archived! Many thanks to NetGalley and Oneworld for this arc.

The Alternatives
By Caoilinn Hughes

I finished this book a week ago and I have been trying to come up with a review that would do justice to this superb piece of artistry, but fear of failure has paralysed me. I'm just going to crack on with it, but honestly, I am just not worthy.

Four Irish sisters, each radically intelligent in their own field, come together in mid life to avert a crisis, while trying to contain their own individual crises and keep the show on the road.

Best not to know too much going into this one, because as in life, the impetus to action and the catalyst to change is seldom what it appears on the surface.

With cracking wit and a mastery of language, Hughes sisters burst from the page as complex and fully developed characters, each of which I am fascinated with. All the side characters are amazing in their own ways and the sense of community is palpable.

The dynamics between the sisters, individuation and collectively are nuanced, hilarious and highly relatable.

Stylistically, Hughes is in a league of her own. A structure that works effortlessly to ground you in a complicated set of perspectives, a play within a novel, and what to me were thrilling insights into geology, psychology, philosophy, social and political reform and gastronomy. At times I knew she was just showing off, but I loved it.

There's no getting away from how Irish this book is, linguistically and attitude-wise. It's charm is universal but it's deep appeal is in how it tittilates at a cultural level.

Thanks to #NetGalley and #Oneworldpublications for the ARC.

The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes is a thoroughly engaging story of four sisters whose parents died in a tragic accident leaving one to effectively raise the other three.

All four sisters go on to have successful careers but are brought back together after Olwen leaves home without a trace or any kind of explanation. The reunion of the three sisters happens in Dublin as they set off to find Olwen who left her home in Galway.

The journey and all that happens afterward shows how different they have become but ostensibly how much they care for each other.

The Alternatives is incredibly realistic in depicting family behaviour in a crisis but also offers an emotional insight into the feelings of each of the sisters as they have matured.

I hugely enjoyed The Alternatives; I thought it had similar vibes to Ann Enright’s work. I will definitely look out for Hughes' other novels now.

I requested an ARC of The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes when I saw the number of prestigious writers effusively praising it and Hughes - having just finished it I can completely understand the praise. The Alternatives is about the relationship between four immensely gifted and intelligent sisters who are living very separate lives until the disappearance of one, Olwen, brings them together. Due to the cleverness of the sisters, who are all individually experts in their chosen fields, the prose pulls no punches - the reader is expected to get to grips quite quickly with their thoughts, philosophies and the intricate details of their specialties. The novel opens with Olwen teaching students about geology and I can see how some readers may choose not to persevere with it if not in the right frame of mind - I nearly didn’t it. But once immersed in their relationship when they come together, I loved it. And despite it not being the easiest of reads, I found it all very easy to visualise and can definitely imagine this adapted for screen. These sisters and their views on politics, philosophy and the environment will stay with me for some time.

I love Caolinn Hughes writing. I loved her previous two novels and The Wild Laughter is a book I recommend over and over again. The Alternatives might now replace that as my go to recommended book.

The four Flattery sisters have to grow up quickly when they lose their parents in tragic circumstances.. Now they are in their thirties living very different lives, all four are gifted, all four have PHD's , all four are living separate lives. Until Olwen, the eldest sister , disappears from her home. The sisters reunite in the Irish countryside searching for their missing sister who has no desire to be found.

I loved reading about these women. The book explores each of their characters before bringing them together and I was so invested in them. The writing is wonderful, the prose dances on the page. Hughes is such an incredible storyteller. My only complaint is I was the final section of the book had of been longer, I wanted to read more.

Another brilliant read from this author and I book I will return to. I am looking forward to buying a copy of this one. Recommend.

4.5 stars.

I found this an intelligent and perceptive exploration of sibling dynamics, but one which didn’t quite hit the mark for me. It tells the story of four sisters, all with PhDs, which is relevant for the narrative, and all of whom are experts in their respective fields. Each is searching to make sense of the world and their place in it. Orphaned at an early age, they developed a close-knit community in their youth but have latterly drifted apart. When Olwen, the eldest, a geology teacher, suddenly drops everything and disappears into a small town in Ireland, the three other sisters come together to track her down, regardless of whether she wants to be found. Once finally reunited, they talk, endlessly, about themselves, their memories and the future. So much of the novel is dialogue heavy that at one point it is written as a play, and it is as though we are watching them perform on a stage. In fact much of the book is performative, as it feels as though they are doing just that, performing for each other, rather than showing any deep family feeling or engagement. Certainly I felt nothing for them, and failed to become invested in the narrative. And as we are always looking on, rather than getting inside their heads, I felt distanced throughout and soon became indifferent to their trajectory.

Very sharp entertaining exploration of the lives of four sisters, all brought together again when one walks out on her life. The first part of the book focuses on each of the sisters, grounding the characters before they come together.

Hughes writes with insight and the novel has great characterisation, sharp wit and knowing contemporary detail.

Although quite dense at times, I enjoyed this. Really interesting presentation of sisterhood and grief with all its complexities and different dynamics. A funny and profound story that I learnt a lot from. I loved the rural Irish setting and now want to read Hughes' other work.

In short, this blew me away. Literary fiction at its most literary, it was surprising and challenging in the best of ways.

The Flattery sisters were orphaned young and have drifted apart as life carries on. When the eldest, Olwen, quits her life and disappears to live off grid, Rhona, Maeve and Nell track her down and a dysfunctional reunion of sorts ensues.

Hughes has crafted an incredibly human story with such richly drawn characters whose life experiences pave the way to an exploration of all of the big things of our times - climate change, food security, government, capitalism and connection. At its heart is a plea, or perhaps a warning, to take care of one another - in our immediate relationships with one another and on a much grander scale.

An existential and complex feat of a novel, Hughes’ intelligence is on full display here and it had my head spinning. There’s no doubt it demands a lot from its reader but ooooft the payoff is worth it. Especially that ending. 🐑

Thanks to @oneworldpublications and @netgalley for sharing a copy with me.

Caoilinn Hughes is an exhilaratingly clever writer, conjuring vivid family scenes in poetic language.

This is the prize winning poet and short story writing author’s third novel – after her devut “The Orchid and The Wasp” and her RSL Encore Award (for second novels) winning “The Wild Laughter” – novels which have combined an intelligent and opinionated examination of late capitalism with some memorable characters and some lively dialogue and original descriptions: and I enjoyed and appreciated both books even though I was not always in agreement with much of the underlying opinions or in sympathy with the characters.

And I think much of the same applies here.

The novel is set in the present day and based around “Four Irish sisters . . . all with PhDs? And none with husbands”: Olwen (the eldest and a geologist based at Galway University), Rhona (an expert on political science at Trinity in Dublin) and Maeve (a private cook and Instagram chef with a couple of published cook books) and the youngest Nell (who lectures on philosophy at a number of US universities). The sisters were orphaned when their wine-shop owner father and maths tracher mother died in a cliff incident in poor weather when Olwen was 17 (and the others 15, 13 and 12 respectively) and were bought up by Olwen when she turned 18 shortly afterwards – with Maeve acting as dinner lady, Rhona covering finances (including selling their parents house when the three eldest were at college) and Nell something of the baby of the family.

The set up of the book is distinctive – the first third or so of the book has lengthy chapters on each sister in turn (Olwen – whose chapter ends with her disappearing from her home and family), Maeve, Nell and Rhona – and their largely disparate and separate lives.

We then have for around fifty pages the latter three sisters, reunited by circumstance, travelling into the remote Irish countryside to find Olwen who is living off-grid (literally as well as figuratively – which causes an issue with Rhona’s electric car) in a basic rural property.

And then with the four sisters reunited – very much against Olwen’s will – their reunion is played out for the rest of the book, some 90 or so pages of it very distinctively via a two act play where the author’s ear for dialogue comes to its fore.

Olwen’s section is set when she takes some of her geology students (and her two young step-children) down to a beach and immediately we get the author’s by now familiar combination of theme and language. Olwen herself is preoccupied with the adverse impacts of climate change – particularly rising sea levels and their acceleration of costal erosion – and there are some great similies in metaphors, for example in one short passage (where we also get our first hint that just as Olwen moved away from her sisters when she is assured they no longer need her, may have taken the same view on her partner and step children whose first wife/mother died young) we get " the ocean silvers up to them like a platter licked clean of hors d’oeuvres" and "The bikes are now jetsam’d about the sand and shingle."

Maeve’s section takes place at a very upper class private dinner party with British sourced food that made we want to book her as a chef

Meanwhile, she also debates what to do about her publishing career: her publisher unhappy with her title let alone concept for the third of her three-book advance contract – for all her complex local cooking her new interest is in food scarcity both present due to economic circumstances and in future due to climate change and her book is due to be about food that can be made “from a pantry of food bank basics …. as well as produce that can be foraged or grown from shared community facilities”.

Maeve lives on a canal boat (part of her aim at the dinner party is to see if she can arrange a mooring on the country estate of the host) with a refugee mime-artist who we never meet but who seems to base his entire existence around mime – I must admit I was not sure if this character was meant to be humorous, metaphorical or intriguing but it did not really work for me. I also did not really like the way the dinner party was scattered with Lords and Ladies as its portrayal of Britain seemed at the Snow-in-Love-Actually level of authenticity. But overall this was an excellent section.

Nell is an intriguing character – suffering with some form of unknown condition but unable to afford to get it checked out as she lacks both tenure and health-care, but her section was I think a little hampered by a too long reproduction of a thought experiment she gives in one of her lectures (even if it does more than hint as to how she sees some of the sisterly dynamics in her family).

Rhona is easily the most sussed, successful and secure (and selfish) of the sisters – something of a global player in the study of how to enhance the domestic process with a particular expertise in citizens assemblies (where of course Ireland is one of the world leaders) and I enjoyed the details here. Again we have a slightly odd side story – here a researcher who takes her place at a lecture in South America and who later (more when the sisters unite) is subject to corporate intimidation – but I think both here and with the mime-artists, the author is ultimately a story teller, and using her short story skills to round out the story. Rhona also has a one-year old child who we are repeatedly told by everyone is adorable but whose purpose in the story (and adorability) was rather lost on me.

When the sisters get together – the individuals circumstances of their lives and the past dynamics between them are played out (quite literally given the format).

I think one’s enjoyment of this part of the novel will depend on how much from the earlier sections the reader has become invested is in the four sisters. I must admit that this is where the novel rather ran away from me – the quick flowing dialogue between them left me feeling rather like I was overhearing an entertaining pub conversation but one in which I was not really involved or invested. And as a result this was perhaps my least favourite of the author’s novels – for all I admired its ideas and language. But plenty of other readers will I think be fascinated by the sisters and their story.