Any list of fine young Irish novelists working today must include Caoilinn Hughes, whose third novel in only six years, The Alternatives, is yet another example of her gift for illuminating the dark places in the lives of dysfunctional, but deeply sympathetic, families.
Hughes (Orchid & the Wasp; The Wild Laughter) takes as her subject the four Flattery sisters. Three are PhDs and college professors: Olwen, an earth scientist at the University of Galway who's driven by her concern over climate change; Rhona, a political scientist at Trinity College Dublin; and Nell, the youngest, a struggling adjunct philosophy professor at three colleges in Connecticut. The fourth, Maeve, is a celebrity chef and cookbook author living on a houseboat in London.
Rhona, Maeve, and Nell unite when Olwen disappears on her bicycle one rainy October evening, leaving behind her partner and his two young sons. They track her to a farmhouse in the north of Ireland, where she's established a life off the grid as her reaction to onrushing environmental destruction, and it's there that the quartet excavate some of the remains of their collective past, including their shared grief over the deaths of their parents when they were teenagers.
But as Hughes reveals in a story that daringly features a two-act drama amid its prose narrative, the other Flattery women, all now in their 30s, are dealing with equally vexing present-day problems. In Hughes's assured hands, the Flattery sisters, a "faulty batch" in all their charming chaos, are vivid and appealing characters in this bighearted, wise, and frequently sharply funny novel. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer