Nesting by Roisin O'Donnell
On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away.
Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe. This was meant to be an escape. But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons.
As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another. What will it take for Ciara to rebuild her life? Can she ever truly break away from Ryan’s control – and what will be the cost?Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.
On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away.
Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe. This was meant to be an escape. But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons.
As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another. What will it take for Ciara to rebuild her life? Can she ever truly break away from Ryan’s control – and what will be the cost?Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.
On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away.
Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe. This was meant to be an escape. But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons.
As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another. What will it take for Ciara to rebuild her life? Can she ever truly break away from Ryan’s control – and what will be the cost?Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.
About the Author
Roisín O'Donnell is an award-winning Irish author. She won the prize for Short Story of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards in 2018, and was shortlisted for the same prize in 2022. She is the author of the story collection Wild Quiet, which was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the Kate O'Brien Award. Her short fiction has featured in The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, the Irish Times and many other places. Other stories have been selected for major anthologies such as The Long Gaze Back, and have featured on RTÉ Radio. Nesting is her first novel. She lives near Dublin with her two children.
Praise for Nesting
'What is [also] striking is the novel’s dizzying speed, a reading experience more akin to devouring a thriller than a work of domestic realism. This is a credit to O’Donnell’s writing, and shows just how far we are invested in Ciara and her daughters’ fate… Nesting offers a moving portrait of life inside the housing system and the courage it takes to try to build a home in society’s cracks'
– Ruth Gilligan, Guardian
‘Confident and compelling… This is a writer, and a novel, deeply concerned to notate a real Ireland: to show us to ourselves, whether we like it or not… It is a novel bright with the energy of its mission, a novel about a country in which men still hold most of the cards, and in which independence (the book’s true subject) is still, for many women, not remotely a given. Here is a novelist who has powerful news to tell, and an impressive range of narrative gifts with which to tell it'
– Kevin Power, Irish Times
'A powerful political novel... Tense, forensically realistic and compulsively readable. Few contemporary novelists dare to get into the nitty-gritty of poverty and its entrapping cycles. O’Donnell makes these everyday battles with housing assistance and child maintenance payments feel genuinely urgent – a word that’s often overused in fiction reviews, but in this case feels earned. This debut is a real achievement, one that more experienced authors of state-of-the-nation novels would struggle to pull off’
– Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
‘Roisín O’Donnell tackles the unsettling cruelties and manipulations of coercive control with insight and emotional complexity. The voice is authentic, vivid and important. The final dedication to ‘anyone trapped in a place that does not feel like home’ says everything. Emotionally charged, psychologically nuanced and full of compassion and possibility, I read with my heart in my mouth’
– Una Mannion, author of Tell Me What I Am
'Nesting is a haunting, deeply affecting debut novel by Roisín O’Donnell – a gripping and unflinching exploration of coercive partner control, societal inequality, motherhood and the terrifying reality of a world closing in fast when you have no options left. An incredibly compelling tale of survival, it is as emotionally charged as it is brutally real. The writing is flawless. I was profoundly moved'
– Elaine Feeney, author of How to Build a Boat
‘O'Donnell presents as her hero a woman society has chosen not to hear, not to see. Nesting will make your blood boil and your heart soar, sometimes on the same page. This is an important novel’
– Claire Kilroy, author of Soldier Sailor
Publisher: Scribner UK
Date Published: 30 January 2025
Hardback, 400 pages
ISBN: 9781398528529
