Academy Street: A Novel

Academy Street: A Novel

<p>A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer</p><p>Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely—a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with.</p><p><i>Academy Street</i> is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City.</p><p>Anne Enright has said that Costello's first collection of stories, <i>The China Factory</i>, "has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right … Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand" (<i>The Guardian</i>).</p><p><i>Academy Street</i> is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life.</p>