A Beautiful Loan
Mary Costello
Available as Hardback, Paperback, eBook
12 March 2026
A heart-wrenching, sweeping new novel following a woman’s life and relationships from the winner of Irish Book of the Year
My name is Anna, and for some time now, I have been trying to account for certain events in my life – my adult life, that is – which, from this vantage point of forty-five years, I often find baffling …
In 1985 Dublin, nineteen-year-old Anna Hughes is in thrall to Peter Gallagher, an older, worldly man. Anna is introverted and naïve, and Peter’s experience, wide circle of friends and thirst for adventure captivate her. Her obsessive longing for him leads to marriage and, eventually, a crushing betrayal.
As Anna’s life becomes less predictable, she uncovers deeper layers of herself. Her journey gives an intimate portrait of a woman embracing herself as she is, claiming the life she yearns for.
“An exceptional, compulsive novel of love, loss and courage. Told in poetic, clear-eyed prose, A Beautiful Loan is heart-breaking but unsentimental, and easily Costello’s best work yet”
Sinead Gleeson
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“Mary Costello is a writer of a rare and exquisite sensitivity — intimate, piercing, death-haunted — with sentences that can turn on a pin into vastness”
Paul Lynch
“A deeply-felt exploration of women’s pain, precisely attuned to the nuances of psychic suffering, and to the ways that our human longing is a misplaced longing for the divine, this is an intensely moving and exquisitely-written novel”
Lucy Caldwell
”A Beautiful Loan is like a beautiful piece of music: true, pure, profound. Anna’s quest, in mid-life, to understand herself and the forces that have shaped her thus far, moves and compels. The spirit of Camus, that humane existentialist, hovers over the novel like hope. I am filled with admiration for Mary Costello”
Claire Messud, Author Of ‘this Strange Eventful History’
“Mary Costello’s A Beautiful Loan creates a gripping and unsparing portrait of Anna Hughes, whose longing to find ‘safety and oneness,’ and to submit to love, deepens as both inner and outer worlds close in. This unsettling novel opened before me like a Rorschach test, troubling all my interpretations”
Madeleine Thien, Author Of ‘the Book Of Records’
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, the EU Prize for Literature and the Prix Littéraire des Ambassadeurs de la Francophonie en Irlande, and has been translated into several languages. Her critically acclaimed second novel, The River Capture (2019) was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards, the Kerry Novel of the Year and the Dalkey Novel Award. Her second short story collection, Barcelona (2024) was an Irish Times Bestseller.