Join Caoillinn Hughes and Barry Pierce as they discuss Caoilinn’s fiercely witty and profound novel The Alternatives.

“A tale about sisterhood, a novel of ideas, a chronicle of our collective follies, a requiem for our agonising species. The Alternatives unfolds in a prose full of gorgeous surprises and glows with intelligence, compassion and beauty.” – Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Trust.

The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties, Olwen and her three younger sisters – each single, each with a PhD – are leading disparate, distanced lives. Until one day Olwen, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her home. Together for the first time in years, her siblings descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. In a derelict bungalow they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future.

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 an Irish writer whose second novel, The Wild Laughter (2020) won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award 2021 and was longlisted for the 2021 Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize Her first novel, Orchid & the Wasp (2018), won the Collyer Bristow Prize 2019 and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her short stories have been awarded the Moth Short Story Prize, the Irish Book Awards’ Story of the Year, and an O. Henry Prize. She has been Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and is currently a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library for 2023-2024. 

Barry Pierce is a books and culture writer based in London. He has been a book critic for the Irish Times, Sunday Times and the Big Issue and his cultural criticism has appeared in Dazed, i-D, British GQ and HERO Magazine.