Familiar

Bethany Joy Dawson holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin and her debut novel, My Father's House, was published in 2013 to critical acclaim. Familiar is her second novel. She is the curator of Upstream, an offering of weekly essays that map the landscape as she sees it – in literary, physical and spiritual ways. Originally from County Down, she now lives in Sligo with her husband and three children.

A richly woven story, gripping, moving and often unexpected. I enjoyed this book immensely.Esther FreudAn exquisitely written novel – every sentence is carefully observed, lyrical and deeply humane. Bethany Dawson writes with an acute understanding of what makes a human being human. Her writing is both painfully honest and simultaneously compassionate. This is a book which will gently haunt you for many months to come.Jan Carson, author of Few and Far Between Bethany Joy Dawson writes to the marrow of family secrets and the pain passed down through generations. Nuanced, compassionate and haunting, Familiar finds redemption and forgiveness in those who have the least reason to give it. Beautifully written and impossible to put down.Una Mannion, author of A Crooked Tree and Tell Me What I AmA beguiling meditation on silence and the damage it can do, Familiar also portrays with power and originality the generational scars that notions of respectability can inflict. Against a particular kind of traditionalism, Bethany Joy Dawson’s three female characters are determined, in their different ways, to be radical, and to reach for the truth. A Northern Irish pastoral, sharply secretive and richly complicated in the way only such a pastoral can be.Belinda McKeon, author of Solace and TenderA motherless young woman, raised without religion or her own history, is suddenly given the gift – or curse – of both. Living in the ghosts of the women who came before her, Cora has to decide how much to recover, how much to accept and how much to reinvent.Familiar is a quietly bold exploration of the beauty and horrors of community, and the terrible betrayals of the self that it can engender.Elske Rahill, author of An Unravelling