Caoilinn Hughes shares an extract from her new novel, ‘The Alternatives’

Reviews for Caoilinn Hughes’ latest release, The Alternatives, have been pouring in, and to say this tale of sisterhood has been well received would be an understatement. Endorsed by Sarah Jessica Parker, Anthony Doerr, and Hernan Diaz (to name but a few), The New York Times described it as “a bold, beautiful, complex novel”, and its author as “an unstoppable force.”

The Alternatives follows the Flattery sisters as they’re plunged prematurely into adulthood following the tragic death of their parents. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill, until one day their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home.

Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. Sheltered in a derelict bungalow, they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future. Warm, fiercely witty, and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers.

Caoilinn Hughes is the author of Orchid & the Wasp, which won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, and The Wild Laughter, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. She was recently the Oscar Wilde Centre Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, and is now a Cullman Fellow at New York Public Library.

Read on for an extract from The Alternatives below…

Twice in the night, Olwen was awakened by a nagging sound from somewhere nearby. Not so near to her tent that she could identify its direction, but the sound was a sort of screaming, so it was hard to tune out. She let out a scream herself, lowering the chassis to urinate—jaysus she’d done a number on her quads from the cycling. A touch of delirium was in the family history, so at first she figured the sound for a waking dream. She’d consumed enough gin to sleep through a full bladder, but this nagging, this scream, had penetrated her consciousness. She rooted around in her bag for earplugs, and she slept then—later into the morning than she might have. Even as she was cooking her breakfast—feeling the cold soil between her toes—she could still hear a sort of mewl in the distance.

After breakfast, Olwen went looking for the source of the animal noises. With the fog lifted, she could see the glacial glen below, where hedgerows bounded the pastureland. Sections of wet heath and fens too. Brambles with late-season blackberries she might trek down for later. All around, Sitka spruce forestry: some clear-felled, some coppicing, some verdant. Up here, the landscape was less structured. There were fewer discernible boundaries for all the scrub—whitethorn, blackthorn, ash, and holly—and sedges.

On her cross-country walks, Olwen would usually bring a square foot of carpet—handy for straddling barbed-wire fences. But the fences up here were few and far between, and the stone walls were half tumbled. Still, it wasn’t easy going, trudging through boggy soil and stiff tufts and deadwood, losing a shoe to muck and roots and cushiony mosses. The grass was slippery but also spiky. But the rougher the landscape, the less resistance she felt within it. She had no plan.

As she tried to get a fix on the whimpering— a sheep, almost certainly—a stream babbled forth out of nowhere. Before she saw it, she’d stepped into it and one shoe was penetrated with icy water. Gasping at the sensation, Olwen lowered her other foot into the water and indulged in the cold extravagance. Soon, very soon, to reach such cold water would be a pilgrimage. It was then she caught sight of the animal.

Well, you’re not blackberries, she said.

Neither lamb nor sheep, it was something in between: a sort of sheep teenager. It had got itself tangled in a blackthorn shrub, scrounging for sloes, and the poor thing was worn out from the ridicule of life. Maeve is the forager in the family, Olwen said. However, sloes I’d make an exception for. She made her way toward the animal, talking calmly over its revivified bleating. D’you know what you can make with sloes . . . is sloe gin. Lovely, tart stuff. The old lamb or young sheep was getting more thorns latched to its wool as it tried to get away from Olwen. Sloes had stained its wool purple in places, like red wine spills on a fireside sheepskin. Olwen slid her arm in over the back of the emo creature’s neck to wrestle its head beneath her armpit. Thorns pronged her fleece. When she had it in a headlock, she took her Leatherman from her pocket. You’d want a machete, really, but . . . knife, scissors, nail file, and pliers are our options. We’ll have a go with a knife. And tell me, while I’m labouring over you: Are you a laggard, or did you try to make a solo job of it? I mean, did you fall off the back of your team . . . or were you making a solo sprint for it, to get up the luscious hill first? Are you a breakaway, is what I want to know?

Rank stress wafted off the animal. The talk wasn’t helping. As soon as she’d cut it free from the last batch of thorns, it bucked into another layer of them. This creature might have a heart attack, she thought, if it hadn’t already. Try that stunt again and I’ll steep you in tikka masala, Olwen said. She had a headache, probably from lack of coffee. The sky was glary overhead, where a sparrow hawk flew mean orbits. Grey clouds clogged the horizon as if a mound of dust had been swept to the edge of the room. If rain was en route and those saddle sores were to have any chance of healing, Olwen was going to need a highly salacious novel to keep her in the tent. Alternatively, a pub with a pool table.

She loosed the woollen boulder from its tangle, wrapped her arms around its midsection, and carried it down the hill until she reached an empty stonewalled field and hesitated, knowing the creature would only destress once it could see more of its eejit kind. So she continued cradling the pongy thing for another half mile down the road, until she came upon a field of livestock. To be able to identify the sheep’s whereabouts, in case it needed veterinary attention or had been reported stolen, she marked an oily X across its back in bright pink bike bearing lube—the only colorant she had at her disposal. She wasn’t a woman for the lipstick. When she lobbed the animal as gently as she could across the stone wall and electric fence, she wondered if the oil was flammable.

Some of the pink oil had come off on her fleece, so she felt moderately like a suicide bomber an hour’s walk later as she entered the first pub of Kiltyclogher village, An Spa Sláinte: a thirsty suicide bomber, allegiant to the call of last rounds.

‘The Alternatives’ by Caoilinn Hughes (€15.99) is on sale now.