The Benefactors is a thoughtful, absorbing novel that quietly shows how much our upbringing and background shape the course of our lives — often in ways we don’t fully recognise until much later. The story follows characters who seem to have very different paths, yet you see again and again how their early circumstances, privileges, and limitations ripple into their futures.

The writing is understated but perceptive, and the author excels at drawing out the little moments of class, expectation, and family history that define people’s choices and chances. It’s not a flashy or fast-paced book, but it lingers.

A strong, nuanced read.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

I really enjoyed reading this book and thanks to NetGalley for the pre-copy. Highly recommend a read

Wendy Erskine’s ‘The Benefactors’ is getting a lot of praise, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s the kind of book that critics will say (probably have said, haven’t checked, bet they have) is an ‘assured debut’ - while relatively straightforward in plot, it’s complex and expansive in the way it’s told. Short sections, varying from just a paragraph to around 10 pages long, explain the story of how a young girl was sexually assaulted at a party and the aftermath of this, through many different voices - from the girl herself, to people seeing the story on the internet, to, crucially, the mothers of the three boys who assaulted her.

Having these different voices is the novel’s biggest strength. The bulk of the story is told through longer sections from the people most closely involved, and we get a lot of insight into their psychology from these - the class dynamics at play between the very wealthy mothers, and the victim, Misty, from a much less wealthy background. The interjection of short and snappy sections, often very funny, makes the novel easy to read through in just a couple of sittings, despite the dark subject matter. Be warned though, it definitely is also dark - Misty is young and vulnerable and given a lot of questionable advice, and parts of it are inevitably really upsetting to read.

As with any novel featuring so many different voices, some are more interesting than others, and the pacing does slow down a little when stuck in one of these longer, less interesting sections - but knowing that a perspective shift is coming soon prevents this from being too big an issue. It’s fair to say, too, that it’s not always entirely clear whose head we’re in in some of these shorter sections, who is narrating, but I also didn’t find this to be such a huge issue. When it’s important to know, you’ll know. Just go with it.

Overall, very good. Funny and sad, simple and expansive, cleverly constructed. An ‘assured debut’, for sure.

‘The Benefactors’ is a well written and impressive novel about family and class (or rather wealth), and how your background largely decides your future. Sadly, it also shows that if you have money you can get away with anything.
There are several narrators and so a lot of different point of views. In the ARC I received it wasn’t always clear who the narrator was as the text hadn’t been formatted yet, which made for a difficult read at times. I think it’ll work far better in the finished novel.
All in all, an interesting and very powerful novel.
Thank you Sceptre and Netgalley UK for the ARC.

The Benefactors is a story centered on three young men accused of sexually assaulting a girl Misty at a party in Belfast, and their well-to-do mothers' reaction to the accusation.

This was an enthralling read from a talented author. Erskine's cast of characters have vibrancy and credibility querying how far would a mother go to defend their son?

The frequent switching of voice comes as a surprise initially but keeps the reader alert.

The Benefactors feels like a really big book. Not in length but it’s expansive and multi-POV and there are so many little details about the characters brought in that make it seem grand.

It centres on three mums as their sons are accused of sexual assault. The girl at the centre of this assault is Misty, who lives with her younger sister & surrogate dad Boogie.

Despite the fact that there are so many POVs here each of the voices feels distinct. I really loved Misty & Boogie & found their relationship very touching. This is brutal & frustrating & echoes back to a nasty court case here years ago. But it’s also funny. And so Belfast. Just a really well crafted novel.

The Benefactors
By Wendy Erskine

I was drawn to this story because, as the mother of boys, I had very complicated feelings during the infamous 2017 Belfast rugby rape trial of those players who got away with misusing a young, vulnerable girl on the basis that she was a "silly girl who was causing trouble for the lads". The female part of me was hoping for a verdict of guilty, yet the mother-of-boys part ached for how they had destroyed their futures. It was a great reckoning, one in which the concept of consent became drilled in every household, every classroom, every locker room.

I thought the mother-son relationships were the ones I would be most interested in, but they fade a bit compared to Misty and her stepdad Boogie. They are primed for judgement, with their unconventional family setup and their lack of means.How can they stand against the wealth and entitlement of her assailants? How easy it is to blame the victim based on what she wore, how much alcohol she had consumed, how charmed she aught to be in these boys' company. We can all be guilty of taking one look at a person and making a judgement.

Last year I surprised myself by loving a story about a young woman who turned to OnlyFans to support herself. "Margo Has Money Troubles" didn't sound promising with it's trashy premise, yet it's humour in the face of wretchedness and the unlikely father daughter relationship will stay with me forever. The comparisons are many between both books.

It took me a good 10 to 15% to get comfortable with Wendy Erskine's writing style. The narrator changes frequently, often mid paragraph (might be an unformatted version I have), and while some narrators are obvious, others seem to be bystanders, and are often written in vernacular. A little patience pays off.

It's a very "Belfast" story, where a sense of horror is dealt with wit, which makes the last page vibrate with irony.

Publication Date: 19th June 2025
Thanks to #Netgalley and #HodderStoughton for providing an eGalley for review purposes.

I wanted to love this a lot more than I did. A few too many issues make it a soft pick.

Misty is a cam-girl who is sexually assaulted at a house party by three of her supposed friends. The boys‘ mothers close ranks to protect their sons, while Misty has her sort-of stepfather to back her up.

The cam-girl thing could have been really powerful but it wasn‘t. The three mothers were all awful, without a redeeming feature between them.

My biggest issue though was all the POV changes and the sub-plots / vignettes of other local people / bit-part players. Too distracting and I hope it‘s just my digital ARC but there wasn‘t any indication of the change of POV - not even a paragraph break. One sentence ran into another and you had to figure it out for yourself. Sounds like I hated it 😬 but I didn‘t - just needed a bit of tightening up in places. And a better layout in print. 🤞

3.5 stars

Unfortunately, this book was not for me. It may be for you if you’re interested in snappy, fast-paced novels with multiple POVs that deal with the topic of sexual abuse and very unlikeable characters. To be honest, I can’t recall the blurb describing the synopsis as it does now, when I first requested it on Netgalley, because otherwise I would have skipped it altogether (I was under the impression that it was an AI-related novel????? clearly I was wrong).

From page 1, I struggled to become interested in the story. The writing style is primarily what put me off. I like to get thrown in a story with multiple perspectives, but in here I found that neither had a particularly strong or distinctive voice. The point might be for the writing style to be messy, for a lack of better word, but I found it unfinished and boring to read. A lot could have been edited out.

I also enjoy reading from an unlikeable character, but I need to be able to understand why they are the way they are. In The Benefactors, the backstories never really lifted off the page or imprinted in my mind why these people were the way that they were.

The first 40% of the story felt like it didn’t really need to be there for me, I probably would have preferred to get straight into the main act and learnt more about each family along the way, rather than a prelude of “here are all the characters you need to care about, but I won’t give you a reason why until the halfway point.” If you know you’re going in for a 2-act kind of story, this might not be as annoying.

Ultimately this was not the book nor genre I was expecting and as a result it has found the ‘wrong reader’ for it. If I hadn’t been reading an arc, I would have put it down much earlier on. If you like quick, snappy, topical contemporary stories, don’t let my review deter you, as this may be a great read for you.

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Oh dear. I wanted to like this. I really did. The premise? Provocative, timely, socially sharp. Female power, privilege, and a sickening tangle of loyalty and denial? Yes. Conceptually, The Benefactors is loaded. In execution, though, I found myself adrift in a sea of disjointed voices and people I could not, for the life of me, bring myself to care about.

Let’s start with the characters. Frankie, Miriam, Bronagh - three women of wildly different backgrounds who’ve all somehow managed to raise sons accused of the same horrific act. And what do they do? They circle the wagons. They lawyer up. They make excuses. And sure, it’s a clever framing device to explore class, complicity, and maternal blindness, but the problem is this: they’re all vile. Not complex in a morally grey, “ugh I hate how much I love you” kind of way. No. Just brittle, self-serving, and emotionally unreachable. If anyone had a single redeeming quality, it must have been buried somewhere in the excessive tangents and murky prose because I didn’t find it.

I’m all for a bleak, unflinching look at the mess of human nature - but if I’m going to spend 300 pages with a cast of self-obsessed, hollow people, I need something. Insight, maybe. Pathos. A scrap of charm? Instead, what I got felt like trying to bond with a broken espresso machine. Lots of noise, no warmth.

The writing style didn’t help. Fragmented, slippery, almost aggressively evasive at times. I get that Erskine’s known for her short fiction, and that stylistic DNA is all over this novel, except here, it felt jarring. Not artfully elliptical, but erratic. I don’t mind a polyphonic structure or shifting POVs, but here the whole thing just collapsed into narrative static. It was like trying to tune into a dozen radio stations at once and getting mostly static and the occasional mumble about class politics or someone’s deeply unlikeable interior life.

Misty, the girl at the centre of it all, could have been a compelling voice. But even she felt more like a symbol than a person, used to carry a theme rather than inhabit the story. And don’t get me started on the “Benefactors” cam site subplot. It had potential to interrogate power, performance, and survival, but instead it felt half-baked and almost performatively “edgy.”

There’s something grimly ironic about a book so focused on people who refuse to reckon with the truth, while the novel itself refuses to cohere around anything emotionally legible. I don’t need likable characters. But I do need to feel something beyond aesthetic fatigue and low-level irritation.

2 stars, generously. Because the ideas are good. The ambition is there. But the execution left me disappointed. This wasn’t a sharp social commentary so much as a muted, meandering walk through the psychic clutter of people I couldn’t wait to leave behind.

Huge thanks to Hodder & Stoughton | Sceptre & NetGalley for the ARC

wow wow wow are we not ok but a definitely ok from reading this book. and i mean because it just bowled me over. the skill, i cant describe it enough to give it justice. because i just felt that writing skill ooze from the page. it seemed so true, and place and paced that only true talent can pull off.
i was pulled in by the themes of the book. but they arent pushed down your throat. but they are so dam important!
im sure i wasnt the only one being pulled in many overthinking directions over this. as woman especially its a real book that makes you think. you can feel the rawness of it. from the mothers, from the victim. just wow.
the mothers in this book are all from a place of private. and they know it. and they go on to use it when their sons are accused of raping a girl at a party. and guess what "kind" of girl this victim is. well not from their side of the isle shall we say. and one of those you just no judgements would be made. yuk.
we lean in and learn so much about our characters. you feel you could picture them both in tone and looks and personality.
you want to read so much more as each character is given over to you. you definitely wont like some of them. you will definitely be shaking with some of them. and you will definitely be heart hurt too. but in the best way. in the needed way. in the perfect way of this book.
i wont give away how it all plays out. but you will be glad for that. for coming to this fresh makes it all the better. your emotions will be on their edges just like mine were.
i dont know what spell Wendy put me under for this book. but she can do it again any time.

This is a brilliant novel and one that will probably be a bit of a marmite book for readers - the shifting perspectives won't be for everyone and could be frustrating for some readers, but the people who love it will love it. It takes a moment to settle into the novel's shifting perspectives but once you do it's brilliant. Like with her short stories, Wendy Erskine is so skilled at breathing life into her characters and portraying them in complex, nuanced ways. It's a thoughtful exploration of class, community and consent at the hands of an extremely talented writer and for such a serious subject there's lots of wry humour here too.

'The Benefactors' is a highly assured debut novel which offers an absorbing, nuanced and timely exploration of consent. The novel follows the perspectives of Frankie, Bronagh and Miriam, the mothers of three teenage boys who have been accused of sexual assault - as well as of Misty, their victim and her family.

Everything about this incident is complex: Misty's initial sexual encounters with these boys were consensual but then became non-consensual, even though she didn't say "no"; she had allegedly sold drugs to the boys; and, a skilled make-up artist, she has fake bruises when she goes to the police. And while the boys come from respectable families (though with divergent backgrounds and personalities), other factors make Misty less likely to be believed, in particular her 'Benefactors' account (a fictionalised site in which women offer different - generally sexual - online services to paying male customers).

The use of the mothers' perspectives is especially effective - all three want to protect their sons but approach this incident from different angles: Frankie grew up in children's homes but now lives a live of luxury after marrying a wealthy widower; Miriam has recently lost her husband in a car accident and is trying to make sense of the fact that her husband had a young woman in the car with him at the time; and, perhaps most interestingly, Bronagh runs a high-profile charity supporting look-after young people so has to juggle her public support for teenagers like Misty with her desire to exonerate her son.

Erskine uses close third-person perspective to describe different events from the perspectives of the characters most closely connected to this case, but intersperses this with short first-person narratives from other characters - some which relate directly to the main plot (for instance, the police officer who had to examine Misty, or one of Misty's 'Benefactors') and some which are more oblique but which relate to the novel's themes. This adds further depth to this novel which is about much more than sex and consent, as it also explores family, class and money.

I thought this was an outstanding novel which avoids offering easy answers to difficult questions. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

I loved this book! Really loved weaving between different POVs. Also perfectly scratched The Bee Sting itch for me!

Initially I found it slightly difficult to get into but once I did, I was hooked. The perspectives of the mothers/family members made this a very interesting read as it does not really focus a lot of the men involved but rather the women. The only one criticism that I have is how the novel was structured where random people kept popping in with opinions and experiences but I think that this just may be the NetGalley ARC version. Overall, I really enjoyed it and the slow burn was worth it.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

I found this book really difficult to engage with and unnecessarily complicated to read due to sudden changes of character perspective which were really jarring and disjointed.
Unfortunately in the end I didn't care about anyone in the book and it all felt like too much effort for little reward and I'm afraid that, unusually, I didn't finish the book.
Thank you to netgalley and Hodder and Stoughton for an advance copy of this book.

Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors follows four families in the aftermath of an alleged sexual assault involving three boys and a girl, all in their late teens, in modern-day Belfast. Whilst a lot of the story is seen through the eyes of the mothers of the three boys (three very different women who will do everything in their power to protect their sons), and although we also get a fair amount of the girl’s perspective on the principal events, at heart this truly is a polyphonic novel in its purest form.

Interspersed with the narratives centred around the ten or so main characters - all told in the third person - there are approximately 50 further short chapters written in the first person that combine to offer a broader depiction of the context in which these main events take place, thereby presenting us with a rich, fantastically observed tapestry of contemporary Belfast. Though initially these short chapters might seem slightly jarring (for it’s not clear how, if at all, they fit into the main storyline nor who each of them is being narrated by) I was soon able to stop trying to scour them for clues and instead simply enjoy them almost as pieces of flash fiction or simply little vignettes of city life, often full of the striking images and witty lines that are characteristic of Erskine’s prose.

There is something about the short story form (in which the author largely made her name) that is undeniably present in this novel, and yet the way in which all the different components, perspectives and characters intertwine to form a skilfully constructed whole, plainly suggests the work of an accomplished novelist. Combined with her brilliant characterization, razor-sharp eye for everyday detail, and deft, original treatment of a number of important subjects (motherhood, the class divide, sexual violence, consent), this makes for a highly recommended read which will cement Erskine’s reputation as one of the most interesting voices in Irish fiction today.

The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine will deservedly be the book everyone is talking about when it comes out on 19th June. It's Erskine's first novel but she's the author of two brilliant short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move, and this skill as a short story weiter really shines through in this novel which is voiced by a kaleidoscope of characters narrating the assault of a vulnerable girl by the golden boys in their community in Northern Ireland.

It is reminiscent of Donal Ryan or Sheila Armstrong in this chorus of voices, which I think are so suited to great short story writers, but this novel is slightly different in that the book meanders back and forth between different characters, throwing new ones into the mix unexpectedly.

This book deals with a lot of really heavy topics really well, but it also injects such humour, and the specificity of that humour and the particular accents and turns of phrases really grounds the book and the characters in reality so well.

It's a really enjoyable book to read given all the different voices, but a heartbreaking one too. A book about assault is always going to be grim, but it thankfully minimizes the details of that event to just one chapter, but delves into the shockwaves it has on the community in really interesting ways. Even when I wanted to scream at some of the characters they didn't stop being compelling - the mothers of the three young men in particular - and I just think that Erskine has a particular incisiveness, talent, and ear for voice that is so impressive.

I was excited to read Wendy Erskine’s debut novel because I love her short story collections and the premise of the Benefactors sounded *so* intriguing. It didn't disappoint; this novel carries over the mastery of prose, dry sense of humour, and nuance of character that is ever-present in Erskine’s short fiction. An absolute banger of a novel and one I will definitely be recommending.

I hate to say it but I didn't enjoy this book. It felt really disjointed as vignettes of the characters are spliced into the mnarrative with no context or warning and there were a lot of "stereotypes" which made the characters feel not quite real. At the start we are introduced to Misty, a young woman who does cam work for "benefactors", her primary client being an American southern ( fried) good ole boy. Misty goes to a party and alleges she has been sexually assaulted by three young men. The setting is Belfast and the three mothers of the boys, despite being from different social classes, use everything in their power to protect their sons and so battle begins with Misty, who also has strong parents to champion her.