The Wardrobe Department
Elaine Garvey
Available as Hardback
A stunning debut examining the ache we all have to belong, from a major new literary talent
A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST DEBUT OF 2025
Mairéad works all hours in a run-down West End theatre’s wardrobe department, her whole existence made up of threads and needles, running errands to mend shoes, fixing broken zips and handwashing underwear. She must also do her best to avoid groping hands backstage and the terrible bullying of the show’s producer.
But, despite her skill and growing experience, half of Mairéad remains in her windy, hedge-filled home in Ireland, and the life she abandoned there. In noughties London, she has the potential to be somebody completely new – why, then, does she feel so stuck? Between the bustling side streets of Soho, and the wet grass of Leitrim and Donegal, Mairéad is caught, running from the girl she was but unable to reveal the woman she’d hoped to become.
Told with rare honesty and equal measures of warmth and bite, The Wardrobe Department is a story about reckoning with the past, finding the courage to change the present – and asking what comes next.
“Astutely observed and beautifully written. I rooted for Mairéad all the way to the end of this impressive debut”
Louise Kennedy
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“Elaine Garvey is a tremendous new talent in Irish writing - I’m certain the reader will recognise inside half a page that she’s the real thing”
Kevin Barry
”The Wardrobe Department is at once familiar and surprising, knotty and tender, tough and beguiling, and its author a sure hand with a light touch … Garvey [is] one of those enviable writers whose piercing eye for human contradiction and self-sabotage never dims her affection for the souls she’s so beautifully painted”
Lisa Mcinerney
“Refreshing … Garvey excels is placing her heroine in the heart of a busy home, surrounded by people she’s known since childhood, but among whom she feels utterly alone … Timely … Witty”
John Boyne
irish Independent
“A truly beautiful novel. Mairéad is an unforgettable character, revealed in tender, sharp, emotional prose. Garvey’s sentences form a delicate pattern, the structure flawless, drawing the reader into the hidden world of London theatre and rural Ireland through complex relationships that question what it means to belong. The Wardrobe Department is that rare thing, already a classic. Garvey is an exquisite talent”
Olivia Fitzsimons
Elaine Garvey
Elaine Garvey is from Co. Sligo, Ireland. She completed an M.Phil. in Creative Writing in Trinity College, Dublin in 2000. Her short stories have been published in the Dublin Review and Winter Papers. She has worked as a programme co-ordinator at the Stinging Fly, was awarded an agility grant for her writing and has recently been selected as a participant on a basic income scheme for artists by the Irish Department of Arts. The Wardrobe Department is her first novel.