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.

The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes is an impressively well written novel. She captures the nuances and dynamics of sibling relationships and their different ways of caring for each other.

The Alternatives is my second book by Caoilinn Hughes, her third is already lined up. What a powerhouse literary talent, honestly - I’m not sure if I missed the early buzz about her work because I know I’m coming to her late but why isn’t literally everyone talking about her???

There’s a particular type of cerebral experience I love with certain books where part of the pleasure is basking in their intellect 😂 and maybe that’s not for everyone, but I just love the fizz of new ideas, of stretching my brain, of thinking about things in a new way. Hughes delivers in spades, but this is also a deeply human story.

It’s about four sisters leading very different lives, who haven’t been altogether for many years. Orphaned young, they’re forced to find their way in the world - Olwen is a geology professor, Maeve is foodie chef, Rhona is a political scientist and Nell is a philosopher teaching at several American universities.

But when Olwen walks out of her life one day and never comes back, the other three come together to find her, and face each other in both reckoning and love.

Through these four flawed, wonderful characters Hughes forces us to look at issues of the world - class, systems of government that have failed us, destruction of the planet, illness. The drama therefore plays out on many levels - at the interior level within each sister, through their relationships with each other, through their chosen professions which look outwards into society and even through the structure of the novel itself, some of which is written specifically as a two-act play.

The dramatic tension this adds is so stylish, and the ideas she grapples with are so profound that I found myself completely in its thrall. This is lit-fic with a capital L slash F, completely in my wheelhouse but sometime to consider before reading. Hughes is incredibly smart, and she writes wholly real characters, who experience anxiety and joy and fear and guilt, who make mistakes, who are selfish and selfless by turn.

I loved this book, and I loved these brilliant women - and the ending? 👀 huge thanks to netgalley for my gifted copy.

Sorry to say I didn’t get on with this one at all, DNF 1/3rd of the way through. It’s not you, it’s me etc. …okay, it’s maybe you a little bit.

We follow four sisters, after the eldest, Olwen, disappears without a trace (though having left a message to say she was okay and leaving of her own accord).

This is a novel of ideas, where all I really wanted was a novel of interesting characters and a plot to engage with. The four sisters felt largely indistinguishable for me, the same person in different circumstances. Each is a doctor in their respective field (geology, cooking, philosophy and citizen’s assemblies), and Hughes utilises the opportunity to reel of screeds of information that just entirely failed to grab me. I think this will work a lot better for a lot of other readers, but I really took against the stylistic choices made - Hughes clearly has things to say and ideas that she wants to get across, but having each character just recite these ideas at length felt like a totally uninspired way to go about this. I’ve sat through my fair share of virtue ethics lectures, and I really think there could have been a more subtle way to engage with these ideas than to make one of the central characters a lecturer, who we observe present a pretty lengthy tutorial to her students.

The prose seemed to be aiming for ‘witty’ but landed somewhere more like ‘grating’, and I can’t say I particularly liked spending time in the company of any of the central or supporting characters.

I think I just caught this novel at the wrong time, and I may well revisit it down the line and find that, with a bit of patience, I can get on board with what Hughes is going for - there are definitely no shortage of really great early reviews. For the time being though I’ll put this one aside, I’m just not sure it’s for me.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the e-ARC.

dnf @ 42%. i want to preface this by saying that i don’t think this book is bad at all, but i did struggle personally with it. the writing style was a bit too much for me at times, although i did love the way the four flattery sisters were fleshed out throughout the narrative. still, it wasn’t enough to keep me engaged, sadly.

This intelligent narrative featuring four Irish sisters challenges the conventional dysfunctional family genre, leaving readers breathless. "The Alternatives" requires a thoughtful examination and the capacity to grapple with emotionally and intellectually challenging philosophical concepts. The formidable sisters, each holding a Ph.D., demand attention.

Meet Olwen, the eldest, an earth scientist deeply concerned about the planet's inevitable demise. Following the untimely death of their parents, she assumed responsibility for her three younger sisters. Rhona, a leading scholar of deliberative democracy and the only mother among them, cares for the adorable one-year-old Leo. Maeve, a celebrity chef, is engrossed in the issue of food scarcity. Nell, an adjunct philosophy professor in the U.S., identifies as bisexual but chooses celibacy.

When Olwen mysteriously disappears, her younger sisters embark on a quest to locate her and succeed swiftly. Olwen's displeasure with the outcome is an understatement, but with four determined and passionate women concerned about global issues, what else can be expected?

Caoilinn Hughes takes a creative leap by weaving a two-act drama into her prose. This multi-page drama allows readers to experience the unfolding events as if they have a front-row seat, maintaining immersion in the story. While introducing a two-act drama is a risk, it pays off by providing an intimate understanding of the four women.

Contemplative, provocative, alternately demanding and compassionate, "The Alternatives" serves as a poignant reminder of the fallacy of control and the constraints of causation. My gratitude to Riverhead Books for granting me early access in exchange for an honest review.

📚The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes

This is Hughes’s third novel but my first time reading her work. The Alternatives is about four Irish sisters flung around the Western world as they’re approaching their middle years and long after the death of their parents. When Olwen, their geologist lecturer sister walks out of her life one night, the others are forced together once again to discover what has happened to her and why she left.

A lot is made by Hughes out of the careers that the sisters have chosen: a geologist, a philosopher on various American campuses; an Instagram chef and a political strategist. The first third of the book is a narrative on how each of the sisters relates to their work and it can drag a little as the level of detail that Hughes goes into over each career seems laboured and tires the concept that how we see the world is delineated through our perspectives. The central mystery isn’t intended to drive the novel - it’s quite like Fleischman is in Trouble in that sense - but instead it’s a musing on sisterhood taken both in the familial sense and also in it’s broader political context. The most engaging moments for me were the environment strands that go through the novel and the question of whether we are bound by community, family or individualism. There’s great intelligence here and it’s a book full of ideas however I think Hughes fails as a fiction writer in this instance in her understanding of how to turn theory into story.

Gorgeous prose, and a compelling story…near perfect until the end which was just deeply unsatisfying. But maybe that was the point? 3.5*

Once upon a time, there were three Irish sisters: Olwen ( a geology lecturer) Rhonda (a political fixer) Maeve (a chef, last book on ‘post Brexit cookery’) and Nell (pansexual free spirit/philosophy lecturer). A family tragedy tore them apart and now another brings them together.

It’s a delicious mix for Hughes’s third novel. Where the casual reader may have trouble is in it’s shifts in style - from broadly comic, to social parody, to an America on the verge of a second bout of Trumpian madness and a thought-experiment on how a united Ireland might actually work. All that cosmic, comic fuel is expended in the last third of the book (which is largely playscript).

So that sleight of hand may leave you short-changed - it’s a quietly comic, structurally daring book which knows it’s audience, but it is as not as thoughtful or uproarious as some recent Irish books. It’s published by Oneworld on 2nd May and I thank them for a preview copy.

The Alternatives has encouraged me to search out each and every book written by Caoilinn Hughes and add it to my TBR because it was flipping outstanding. Utterly wonderful, heart wrenching, heart warming, every emotion under the sun tingling in some way or other

So, literary genius platitudes aside, the story; Four sisters are fragmented following the tragic passing of their parents, their lives and their PHd's taking them in very separate directions. However, when the oldest sister suddenly disappears after becoming increasingly scared of the fate of the earth, the younger sisters travel to Ireland to come together and find their lost sibling. The sisters get caught out and take shelter in an old building whereby they pass the time resolving old conflicts.

The narrative is warm, funy, and authentic. It has a great integrity that celebrates independant womanhood without it being alienating, sisterhood without co-dependancy

A stunning novel,and a highly recommended shining beacon of women's fiction

Thank you to Netgalley for this incredible literary ARC. My review is left voluntarily and the opinions are my own