Academy Street
Mary Costello
Available as Paperback, Paperback
The heartbreaking and evocative debut novel by award-winning Irish writer, Mary Costello
WINNER OF THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2014
She stood on the edge of the grass. She hovered between worlds, deciphering the ground, tracing in mid-air the hall, the dining-room, the stairs. She was despairingly close to home now, to the rooms and the voices that contained the first names for home. Memories abounded and her heart pounded and history broke in …
Growing up in the west of Ireland in the 1940s Tess is a shy introverted child. But beneath her quiet exterior lies a heart of fire. A fire that will later drive her to make her home among the hurly burly of 1960s New York.
Over four decades and a life lived with quiet intensity on Academy Street in upper Manhattan, Tess encounters ferocious love and calamitous loss. But what endures is her bravery and fortitude, and her striking insights even as she is ‘floating close to hazard.’
Joyous and heart-breaking, restrained but sweeping, this is a profoundly moving story that charts one woman’s quest for belonging amid the dazzle and tumult of America’s greatest city. Academy Street establishes Mary Costello as one of Ireland’s most exciting literary voices.
“Packed with emotional intensity”
sunday Times
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“A writer of huge ability … Brings to mind John Williams’s resurrected masterpiece, Stoner”
guardian
“To recount a life story in a novel is a difficult task. To do so with brevity and unsentimental honesty takes greatness. Academy Street is a powerful and emotional novel from one of literature’s finest new voices”
John Boyne
“An exceptional first novel”
the Times
“With extraordinary devotion, Mary Costello brings to life a woman who would otherwise have faded into oblivion”
J.m. Coetzee
Mary Costello
Mary Costello lives in Galway. Her short story collection, The China Factory (2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Her first novel, Academy Street (2014), won the Irish Novel of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards and was named overall Irish Book of the Year. It was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa First Novel Prize and the EU Prize for Literature. Her second novel, The River Capture, was shortlisted for Irish Book Award for Novel of the Year, Dalkey Literary Festival’s Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Novel of the Year. It was also selected as the Book of the Year by the Irish Independent and the Irish Times