I wanted so badly to enjoy this one, but I simply couldn't get into it. I enjoyed the first chapter and then found myself almost completely disengaged from everything that happened thereafter. I found this rambling, but not in the way that I usually enjoy. I often enjoy books with a more interior character focus, but I just found myself thinking "why do I need to know this?" again and again.
I really enjoyed the dialogue, and I think this, paired with the fantastic audiobook narration is what compelled me to keep reading. I found the scenes of dialogue between the sisters to be quite cinematic, but there were long-winded offshoots of description or internal monologues that were difficult to care about or connect with.

I spent almost two thirds of the book trying to determine if there were three or four sisters and with the exception of Olwen, it was almost impossible for me to tell them apart (although, I don't think this is necessarily a problem with the writing and a little more to do with me). I know this is probably an allegory of some sort, but I didn't find any of the characters likeable, interesting or engaging enough to thinking about it more deeply.

I found the long sections of intellectual monologuing a little bit draining. There are so many "ideas" and "thoughts" and "philosophies" and "big themes" and to be honest, maybe I found it a little alienating. We GET IT. You're a genius. It's not lost on me that my favourite character was Maeve (the influencer chef) lol. Ultimately had to push myself to finish this novel, but I JUST CAN'T DNF ANOTHER BOOK THIS MONTH. I need a win. Thanks to #Netgalley and the publisher Oneworld for an ARC of this book.

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.